For two days in a Denver nightclub, blockchain enthusiasts explored the possibilities of a completely new type of organisation. Going to space is only the first step.

As the usual crowds of investors and coders descended on downtown for one of the world's largest annual crypto gatherings, a more starry-eyed crowd congregated in the bowels of a cavernous nightclub here to plot the next stage of the techno-revolution.

While cryptocurrencies have already threatened to disrupt financial systems, supporters of another blockchain-based innovation want to change the way people do almost everything else: fighting climate change, building infrastructure, preserving historic photographs, and exploring outer space, to name a few of their projects.

The Decentralised Autonomous Organisation is their tool. DAOs are mission-driven organisations whose members use blockchain technology (also known as a distributed digital ledger) to raise funds and make decisions collectively online without centralised control. In a nutshell, it's as if an online chatroom were used to run a business.

Private businesses, sovereign nations, and most other existing organisations, in their opinion, have little chance in the face of these new groups. While many sceptics believe DAOs will be nothing more than a passing fad — the technology is already vulnerable to hacking and regulatory scrutiny — scepticism was not the order of the day this week in Denver.

"DAOs are the future of human coordination," said James Tunningley, a former British diplomat who left his post in Nairobi, Kenya, last year to immerse himself in the world of blockchain.

Tunningley was among the hundreds of visitors from all over the world who came to hear talks and party at Temple Night Club, the site of DAODenver on Tuesday and Wednesday. The event was a satellite of ETHDenver 2022, a yearly gathering dedicated to Ethereum, the world's second-largest cryptocurrency network after Bitcoin.

"It's such a showcase of what the future of society looks like," said DAODenver speaker Michael Healy, a former Wikileaks volunteer who recently advised a project that used blockchain tokens to raise funds for the restoration of a disused rural road on the Indonesian island of Bali. "We're not reliant on the government to build things," said Healy, a long-haired British-Singaporean who predicted DAOs would become the dominant infrastructure financing vehicles in the coming years. He explained that the tokens for the Bali project would simply allow funders to display their contributions online, similar to having their name on a museum wall. Future infrastructure projects could provide more practical incentives to token holders, such as allowing them to automatically receive toll revenues.

DAO supporters argue that the groups have the potential to be more agile and create better incentives than existing institutions because the groups can automatically grant governance rights and other rewards to participants who complete desired tasks. Thousands of DAOs have been formed, and supporters expect their numbers to reach the millions, if not billions, in the near future.

So far, they've generated a lot of buzz but little in the way of tangible results. ConstitutionDAO, a non-profit organisation, gained international attention late last year when it raised tens of millions of dollars to purchase an original copy of the Constitution at auction. In the end, a hedge fund magnate outbid it. Another organisation, CityDAO, purchased land in Wyoming as part of its goal of creating a real-world community for its members. However, the organisation was hacked in January, and tens of thousands of dollars were stolen from its treasury.

As DAO supporters look for their first mind-blowing accomplishment, hopes are focused on MoonDAO, a conference sponsor, which plans to launch some of its members into space on a private flight within the next few months.

Pablo Moncada-Larrotiz, a former Google engineer who quit his job to build a DAO that would allow groups of friends to pool access to their possessions, founded the group. He said the project was inspired by a passage from the Whole Earth Catalog, a 1960s counterculture publication with an anti-consumerist ethos.

Moncada-Larrotiz launched his second group, MoonDAO, late last year, with the initial goal of raising $450,000 to purchase a single Virgin Galactic spaceflight ticket. The organisation raised more than $8 million at its inception, and Moncada-Larrotiz claims it now has more than $30 million on hand. In January, the group announced that it had secured a "soft reservation" for multiple seats on a rocket being launched by Blue Origin, Jeff Bezos' space company. Moncada-Larrotiz declined to elaborate on his organisation's discussions with Blue Origin, which did not respond to a request for comment.

He said the group was still on track to send members into space around the middle of the year, despite the speculative nature of the endeavour. "Everyone is just playing around with DAOs," he explained. "No one knows exactly what the blueprint is yet."

On Tuesday, his organisation sponsored the Full Moon Party, where blue hair was the look of the night and revellers were eager to discuss their blockchain ambitions. Shumo Chu, 35, demonstrated VitaDAO, a group dedicated to longevity research, and argued that DAOs provided a better system of incentives for advancing scientific knowledge than academic and pharmaceutical industry models.

Jade Darmawangsa, 21, promoted ReFi DAO, a network of environmental organisations. Beyond the talk of transformative potential, she explained, there was a more practical reason to organise as a DAO: the massive inflows of investment capital into crypto technologies. "We need the Web3 money," she said, referring to blockchain-based internet services as a whole.

Throughout the day, attendees sipped coffee at tables normally reserved for bottle service at a venue that will host Pauly D — the DJ best known for his star turn on MTV's "Jersey Shore" — later this month.

Speakers there offered a mix of utopian visions and practical advice.

"This whole concept of a DAO is not a foreign concept," one speaker stated. "For thousands and thousands of years, African villages and communities have done it this way." We're just removing all of these superfluous layers and getting back to the basics." A breakfast discussion on combating homelessness was hosted down the street by H.E.R. DAO, a feminist developer collective.

Other speakers advised founders to avoid using words like "interest" and "securitise," which could attract the attention of Washington regulators, who have begun to be concerned about the risks of crypto — and are moving to limit an industry that prefers to write its own rules.

Legal incorporation is a significant impediment to the DAO founders' audacious visions. While some jurisdictions, most notably Wyoming, have taken steps to create new legal structures for DAOs, the majority of the groups must first register under pre-existing structures before engaging in many real-world activities, such as opening a bank account.

MoonDAO is one of the groups that must deal with such earthly concerns before its members can reach the stars. According to Moncada-Larrotiz, the group is deciding where to register as a 501(c)(3) unincorporated nonprofit association.

After its first spaceflight, he said, the group, which has rallied hundreds of experts and enthusiastic amateurs around space exploration, will focus on its long-term goal of establishing a self-sustaining lunar base (managed by "robots and people").

He speculated that the DAO, which has active members in China and is working to establish a presence in India, could compete with nation-states and private companies like SpaceX in the race to colonise the solar system.

"I realise how crazy this all sounds," he admitted. "But it's been such a wild ride that I'm beginning to believe."

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