Coincheck launches support for DAO tokens in Japan. Cointelegraph spoke with Kagayaki Kawabata, Business Development Lead at Coincheck.com, to find out how high DAO could rise in the Land of the Rising Sun.

What is DAO all about

Decentralized Autonomous Organization or DAO, is a project of Stock.It, a German company that has been developing smart-locks based on Ethereum. In a whitepaper released by the company on their website titled ‘Decentralized Autonomous Organization to Automate Governance,’ the workings of DAO are explained in great detail.

Basically DAO is a way of using the blockchain to create a venture capital fund. As the paper puts it, “In exchange for ether, a DAO’s code creates tokens that are assigned to the account of the person who sent the ether.

The token grants its holder voting and ownership rights. The number of tokens created is proportional to the amount of ether transferred. Token price varies over time. Token ownership is freely transferable on the Ethereum blockchain, when the Creation Phase has ended.

The DAO enters Japan

As of May 27, 2016, the DAO crowd sale has collected more than US$ 143 million. We recently learnt that DAO tokens will be supported by Coincheck Japan.

In light of this, Cointelegraph spoke with Kagayaki Kawabata (Kaga), Business Development Lead at Coincheck.jp to find out more about DAO in Japan and what his company proposes to do with it.

Coincheck was the first company to support Ether buying and selling in Japan and it is natural for them to offer DAO related services as well.

Kaga says that there is demand for DAO in Japan:

“There were many existing customers that demanded support for The DAO, which prompt us to implement DAO Tokens wallet and buying/selling features.”

The Shape of DAO in Japan

Japan is the 3rd largest economy in the world with a GDP of USD 4.41 trillion. The country has shown a great deal of interest in embracing new fintech like Blockchain and Bitcoin.

We have previously covered in detail how new legislation could pave the way for Japan to completely accept digital currency as a legitimate entity.

However when it comes to DAO, the interest is still at a nominal level. We were told by Kaga that the general public only have some knowledge about cryptocurrency but there is interest being shown by big corporations and banks.

He says to Cointelegraph:

“If even one successful project emerges from The DAO, it has tons of potential to attract interest from existing capitals and ordinary people.”

New Technology Brings New Concerns

Of late there have been many voices raised about governance issues surrounding DAO. According to Kaga there are no benchmarks with which the DAO can be compared.

When asked about potential governance concerns surrounding the DAO, he says:

“The DAO has a potential to replace traditional funds and venture capitals. However, at the same time the concept is so new that we are concern whether a group of amateur investors can make a legitimate funding decision. Traditional funding decisions are made by an experienced fund manager. Many elements come into an account including founders personality, skill sets and etc. when funding a company or a project. The DAO funding decision is made by a group of amateur investors only based on the information showed on the websites. We are very interested whether first practical experiment for a decentralized autonomous organization will be a success or not. We will continue to see how The DAO progress in coming years.”

Can DAO change the way we run businesses?

One thing is clear, that there has been no previous attempt to fund businesses and protect the rights of shareholders through blockchain or through any other form of automation before.

The existing corporate governance structure is based on private and public law. The powers that be however do not always play by the book and this has been a problem that has plagued businesses for centuries.

What does the future hold if we automate corporate governance through technology like the DAO? Will it usher in an age where machines take a more sentient role?

As Kaga says:

“A decentralized autonomous organization could be a standard structure of a company or any other organization. There might be even a company where CEO is absent. Maybe something similar to Skynet may emerge. We are very excited to see how The DAO will evolve in next few years.”