In their opinion, private businesses, sovereign nations and most other existing organizations stand little chance in the face of these new groups. While plenty of skeptics doubt DAOs will amount to much more than a fad — the technology already faces hacking and regulatory concerns — skepticism was not the order of the day this week in Denver.

“The future of human coordination is DAOs,” said James Tunningley, a former British diplomat who left his posting in Nairobi, Kenya, last year to immerse himself in the world of blockchain.

Tunningley was among the hundreds of globetrotting attendees haunting talks and parties 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 second-largest cryptocurrency network behind 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 rural road on the Indonesian island of Bali that had fallen into disrepair. “We’re not dependent on the government to build things,” said Healy, a long-haired British-Singaporean, who predicted DAOs would become the dominant vehicles for financing infrastructure in the coming years. He said the tokens for the Bali project would simply give funders the ability to display their contributions online, like having their name on the wall at a museum. Future infrastructure projects could provide token holders more practical incentives, such as by allowing them to automatically receive toll revenues.

DAO proponents argue that the groups have the potential to be nimbler and create better incentives than existing institutions, because the groups can automatically grant governance rights and other rewards to participants who perform desired tasks. Thousands of DAOs have been formed, and backers expect their numbers to reach into the millions, or even billions.

So far, they have generated lots of hype, but little in the way of signal accomplishments. One group, ConstitutionDAO, attracted international notice late last year when it raised tens of millions of dollars to buy an original copy of the Constitution at auction. In the end, it was outbid by a hedge fund magnate. Another group, CityDAO, bought a plot of land in Wyoming as part of its goal of building a real-world community for its members. But the group was hacked in January, and had tens of thousands of dollars stolen from its treasury.

As DAO proponents look to notch their first mind-blowing achievement, hopes are fixed on MoonDAO, a conference sponsor, which intends to launch some of its members into space on a private flight within the next several months.

The group was founded by 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. He said the project was inspired by a passage from the Whole Earth Catalog, a counterculture publication launched in the 1960s with an anti-consumerist ethos.

Late last year, Moncada-Larrotiz launched his second group, MoonDAO, with an initial goal of raising $450,000 to buy a single Virgin Galactic spaceflight ticket. The group raised more than $8 million at its launch, and Moncada-Larrotiz said it currently has more than $30 million on hand. In January, the group announced it had secured a “soft reservation” for multiple seats on a rocket being launched by Blue Origin, the space business founded by Jeff Bezos. Moncada-Larrotiz declined to comment further on his group’s talks with Blue Origin, which did not respond to a request for comment.

He said the group remained on track to send members into space around midyear, even as he acknowledged the speculative nature of the endeavor. “Everyone’s just experimenting with DAOs,” he said. “No one really knows what the blueprint is yet.”

His group sponsored the Full Moon Party on Tuesday, where blue hair was the look of the night and revelers were eager to discuss their blockchain ambitions. Shumo Chu, 35, showed off VitaDAO, a group dedicated to longevity research, and argued that DAOs offered a better system of incentives for advancing scientific knowledge than the models offered by academia and the pharmaceutical industry.

Jade Darmawangsa, 21, talked up ReFi DAO, a network of environmental groups. She explained that beyond the talk of transformative potential, there was a more practical reason to organize as a DAO: the massive flows of investment capital into crypto technologies. “We need the Web3 money,” she said, using the umbrella term for blockchain-based internet services.

During 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 the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” — later this month.

There, speakers offered a mix of utopian visions and hard-headed advice.

“This whole notion of a DAO is not a foreign concept,” declared one speaker. “This is how African villages and communities have been doing it for thousands and thousands of years. We’re just stripping down all these useless layers and going back to roots.” Down the street, H.E.R. DAO, a feminist developer collective, hosted a breakfast discussion on combating homelessness.

Other speakers advised founders to avoid using words like “interest” and “securitize” that could trigger the attention of regulators in Washington, who have started to worry about the risks of crypto — and are moving to put some limits on an industry that prefers to write its own rules.

One important barrier to the bold visions of DAO founders is legal incorporation. While some jurisdictions, notably Wyoming, have taken steps to create new legal structures for DAOs, most of the groups must register under pre-existing structures before taking many real-world actions, such as opening a bank account.

Before its members can reach the stars, MoonDAO is among the groups that has to deal with such earthly concerns. Moncada-Larrotiz said the group was deciding where to register as a 501(c)(3) unincorporated nonprofit association.

After its first spaceflight, he said the group, which has galvanized hundreds of experts and enthusiastic amateurs around space exploration, will turn to its long-term goal of creating a self-sustaining lunar base (maintained by “robots and people”).

He mused that the group could use some of its resources to hire professional engineers and argued that the DAO, which has active members in China and is working to establish a presence in India, could be competitive with nation-states and private companies like SpaceX in the race to colonize the solar system.

“I realize how crazy all this sounds,” he said. “But it’s been a wild ride, so I’m starting to believe.”