The NEAR protocol is forming a working group to develop standards for autonomy. According to Monday’s announcement, the initiative, called the Near Digital Collective (NDC), aims to further decentralize the ecosystem’s decision-making by moving it to its native blockchain.
Although NDC will make decisions on-chain, and the NEAR token has been reserved as a collective governance token, the protocol’s co-founder Illia Polosukhin avoided referring to it as a DAO in an interview.
“I usually think in terms of blockchain, so it’s more of a protocol for how people interact and make decisions,” Polosukhin said.
And then we’ll codify some of that into the smart contract, some of it will be codified into the constitution, and some of it will be codified into the processes built around it.