The DAO relies on its Curator for failsafe protection and is incredibly privileged to have a high profile set of signatories. The DAO’s Curator multisig holders are:
*All curators act as individuals independent of their Employers
A Curator is a failsafe mechanism that indirectly prevents malicious actors from executing 51% attack. Curators do not add centralization to the DAO: they are nominated by the DAO Token Holders themselves, and can be fired at any time, for any reason. Curators curate the whitelist, the list of Contractors authorized to receive ether from the DAO. The following table shows the different responsibilities of curators and token holders
| Task | Curators | Token holders |
|---|---|---|
| Check that the published Contract on the Ethereum blockchain matches the source code the Contractor claims to have deployed (this is done by comparing bytecode). | ||
| Confirm that a Proposal comes from an identified person or organization. This is done by asking the entity submitting the Proposal to send a signed transaction with a certain set of data only known to the Curator and the author of the Proposal, thereby confirming the author of the Proposal. | ||
| Evaluate whether a Proposal is ‘good’ or not. | ||
| Audit the Proposal’s smart contract code. | ||
| Provide legal advice regarding the Proposal (if any). | () | |
| Take an economic responsibility for the Proposal. |
The DAO could end up being dissatisfied with the performance of the Curator, in which case it will want to change it. Changing the Curator takes the form of a Proposal with a special flag. Votes on changing the Curator take place in two steps. The first, a non-binding vote on whether DAO Token Holders would like to switch Curator or not. The second, a confirmation vote to give a chance to DAO Token Holders to confirm the result of the first vote, or a chance for the minority to ‘split’ their DAO into two and retain control over their ETH.
If a split occurs, both DAOs would continue to operate, each with their own unique tokens, and each with potentially different Curators and Contractors. This would be the equivalent of a large company splitting into two. The rewards for projects already backed by The DAO are also split and fairly distributed: DAO Token Holders on both sides of the split will continue to receive any ongoing rewards from Proposals made prior to the split. Of course, Proposals backed after the split will only distribute rewards to their respective DAO.
Note that the above has an added advantage: it prevents someone from acquiring 51% of the tokens then passing a Proposal sending himself 100% of The DAO’s ETH. This idea originates from a blog post by Vitalik Buterin. The very possibility of a split indeed renders this attack moot: the legit minority would stay with its current Curator holding 100% of their own ETH, while the majority attacker would be left without Curator, and with only the ETH they put in themselves.