The Ethereum community gave birth to the DAO concept. Vitalik Buterin produced a great blog post on DAO, DO, and DA.

The idea behind DAO originated from DAC (Decentralised Autonomous Corporation/Company), a more financially oriented subclass whose primary function is to convert human corporation organisations into autonomous computer organisations. "The DAO," an investment group set up with an Ethereum smart contract, is one instance of DAC.

DAO is defined by Vitalik as

"It is an entity that lives on the internet and exists autonomously, but also heavily relies on hiring individuals to perform certain tasks that the automaton itself cannot do"

This idea might be used to see Bitcoin as a single DAO. It appears that DAO and DApp have a lot in common. Vitalik picked the word “Organization” over “Application” to make it more differentiable from the usual P2P application.

DApp vs DAO

Despite coming from two distinct groups of individuals, the two concepts are occasionally used interchangeably. The word "autonomous" is the primary distinction. One kind of DApp that can be considered is the fully autonomous DApp, or DAO. DAO is not always a DApp.

DApp and DAO are different on automation level

At their most, the blockchain-based DApps that are currently in use could be classified as Level 1.5 or Level 2. It does not allow for human interference, yet it has no capacity for self-learning; instead, its business logic is pre-fixed and can only be altered by a majority vote.

DAO is intended to have Level 5 automation and be fully autonomous. The application must to make judgements based only on its own intelligence and develop as a result of its choices.

No human created applications reach the “Autonomous” level yet.

The degree of automation is left out by DApp. Since there is currently no autonomous software, all of the examples provided were of automated software. Every DApp now in use, including Bitcoin, is based on a blockchain and automates pre-written business logic. Since no one has yet reached the DAO—some have even dubbed themselves "The DAO"—Vitalik referred to it as the holy grail.

So DAO is mainly a good vision, not reality (yet).

iDApp: Intelligent DApp

DApp concept does not concern the intelligence level and assumes current application is basic level automation. DAO is about the future not current.

However, as AI research advances, autonomous driving is approaching Level 3 or 4. To close the gap between DApp and DAO, a novel idea known as iDApp, or Intelligent DApp, is put forth.

iDApp is the DApp with certain level intelligence.

It could employ machine learning approaches to learn from the decision results rather than pre-programmed business logic. For instance, it could modify the proportion of incentives based on the present environment rather than using a constant payment method. It may pay miners more if it requires greater processing power.

iDApp uses blockchains instead of relying on blockchains

As mentioned, blockchain is like the operating system that provides a good infrastructure. Instead of deploying to the blockchain, iDApp itself decides how it utilizes underlying computing infrastructure. It could deploy itself to existing public chain or start its own new chains and migrate as it wants

Public, Consortium and Private does not matter anymore

iDApp chose the best option available to outsource their needs for computing infrastructure. It is only concerned with meeting the needs of the clients it serves since doing so will increase sales. If the consumers needed privacy, it wouldn't use the Public chain because it would lose all of its customers and revenue if it did.

We may be in the middle of the greatest evolution in human history at this point in our evolution. However, we are only getting started.

Bitcoin might be possible with blockchain. But all we did was unleash the force of "Decentralisation" to make the application unstoppable and impervious to censorship. Its applications are rather limited. This is also the case with autonomous vehicles. Type 2 autonomous driving has limited applications and is not very helpful.

We believe that iDapp's "intelligent" power could significantly alter the situation. Similar to the confidence in self-driving cars, it has the potential to reduce operating costs and enable "impossible" business models.