DAO-ML to Solidity: A Scalable Code Generation Approach for Decentralized Autonomous Organization Development

Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are a class of Decentralized Applications (DApps) using smart contracts to facilitate governance processes. The design of DAOs is affected by additional complexity compared to other DApps due to the need to specify organizational roles, permissions, and control relations early in the early development stages of the system. In addition, DAOs face scalability challenges. While existing Model-Driven Development (MDD) tools support general smart contract and DApp design, they lack constructs tailored to the organizational and governance features unique to DAOs. To bridge this gap, we develop a code generation approach for DAO-ML, a visual modeling language for DAO design. The translator we implement for this method generates smart contracts of DAOs with suitably configured roles and permissions from visual models. The generated smart contracts particularly optimize the representation of roles and permissions to improve the system scalability and handle complex governance structures, necessary to increase the utility of DAO systems. The approach is evaluated in the context of an in vivo case study on the development of a DAO for the disintermediated management of local tourism. This work advances MDD for decentralized systems by bridging high-level governance modeling with executable, gas-efficient smart contract code generation.