Why is a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) a natural fit for a permissionless blockchain — yet usually shouldn't have its own chain?

A DAO's investors are mutually distrusting and possibly unknown, which is exactly the permissionless case; but it needs only smart contracts and an existing currency, so it's better built on top of an existing chain like Ethereum than on a fresh one.

A DAO is an organization run autonomously by smart contracts — no central management, rules encoded in code, investors voting on how to deploy funds. Run it through the methodology: it stores state, and has multiple mutually distrusting, often anonymous writers → permissionless is the natural fit. But "fits permissionless" doesn't mean "needs its own blockchain." A DAO's needs — state, smart contracts, a currency to move — are already provided by a general-purpose chain like Ethereum. So in most cases a DAO should be deployed on an existing chain, not bootstrap a new one (which would need its own security, currency, and validator set).

Go deeper:

• Decentralized autonomous organization (Wikipedia) — organizations run by smart contracts on a shared ledger, and the 2016 "The DAO" case.