UNICEF's Foray into Crypto: Agency Tests Prototype DAO for Digital Public Goods

cryptonews.com:

UNICEF, a United Nations agency focused on humanitarian aid and relief to children, is further venturing into the cryptosphere with its ongoing work related to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) prototype. 

"Right now, we're building a DAO prototype to fairly distribute power and communication for a globally distributed digital public good," Arun Maharajan, the blockchain lead at UNICEF, told TheBlock in a recent interview at the Paris Blockchain Week show. 

Digital public goods (DPGs) are types of open-source software, models and standards that organizations can employ with the aim to operationalize their digital public infrastructure, according to a definition developed by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).

Owing to DPGs, “[d]evelopment partners can contribute by focusing on underlying challenges like co-ordinating multilateral efforts, improving public procurement, supporting financial and project continuity, and breaking down silos to enable co-development,” the OECD said in its 2021 Development Co-operation Report. 

UNICEF’s early stage pilot, which is being developed on top of the Layer 2 solution Polygon, is designed to facilitate improved communication between DPG stakeholders during their discussions of potential new features to a project. Ultimately, such projects could use the functionalities offered by DAOs to allow stakeholders to fund new features after the involved community votes to implement them. 

“In a sense, it’s a closed DAO for each DPG to get all the stakeholders on board,” according to Maharajan. 

“Right now we are looking at team members but I think it’s perceivable that it could even include end users or other stakeholders so that really the community around