I've been following the DAO space for years. Most of what I see is focused on treasury diversification for crypto projects, NFT communities, or small-scale grant programs. It's interesting, but it feels like we're still in the first inning.

I'm interested in the next layer up: using a DAO as the primary governance structure for a complex, private, multi-generational entity.

Think of the real-world use cases:

A family office managing diverse global assets across multiple jurisdictions.

A private foundation aiming to execute on a founder's mission for centuries, immune to the shifting priorities of future boards.

A sovereign trust for a private group of principals to manage joint ventures and strategic capital allocation.

The legal and regulatory hurdles are obviously immense, and I'm not ignoring them, but I'm more interested in the technical and governance models. How do you structure voting to prevent capture by a single party in a high-stakes environment? How do you handle succession? How do you build a system that is both resilient and adaptable over a 100+ year timeframe?

It feels like the technology is almost there, but the strategic application is lagging.

Has anyone seen serious attempts to model this? White papers, academic research, even well-documented failed projects (post-mortems are often the most valuable)? Curious what the HN community has come across.