This essay presents a design and research articulation of an inter-DAO governance and coordination framework intended for DAOs operating on the Nouns Builder Protocol (nouns.build) and the wider ecosystem of Nounish and forked DAOs. The framework combines Hyperlane’s permissionless Layer 0 cross-chain messaging with the Open Intents Framework’s declarative “intent” abstraction to enable coordination and governance actions across chains without compromising DAO sovereignty. Rather than proposing a single unified meta-DAO or centralized bridge, the design emphasizes a fractal model in which autonomous DAOs can collaborate through standardized messages and outcomes while remaining independently governed. The essay closes with a pragmatic implementation on-ramp—the Nouns World Bridge—as a minimal deployment that validates core ideas first, then expands toward richer cross-chain execution and Superstack-wide operations.

The Nouns ecosystem showed that a strong cultural primitive, paired with onchain auction funding and transparent governance, can support sustained collective action. Nouns Builder extends that pattern into a protocol and deployment platform: communities can launch DAOs quickly using modular, onchain components—auction logic, membership/voting tokens, proposal governance, and a treasury that executes approved actions—without custom engineering for the fundamentals of “DAO plumbing.”

The payoff of this modularity is scale. Many independent communities can form around distinct missions and aesthetics while sharing a recognizable governance substrate. But the cost of plurality is coordination. As more Builder DAOs emerge—and as Nounish forks deploy across multiple EVM chains—collaboration increasingly depends on offchain social coordination: Discord threads, ad hoc working groups, and trusted multisigs for execution. Those methods are workable at small scale, yet brittle under growth: they are slow, hard to audit, and place disproportionate power in operational intermediaries.

The design problem is therefore not “how to centralize governance,” but how to allow independent DAOs to coordinate without abandoning the things that make them independent. The goal of this framework is to make sovereignty composable: to let DAOs collaborate across chains through verifiable signals and standardized commitments, while preserving each DAO’s ability to decide what it will accept, how it will validate it, and whether it will execute anything at all.

Inter-DAO coordination tends to fail when it quietly introduces hierarchy. If one DAO must approve another’s participation, or if a single committee maintains an allowlist of “valid” participants, then the system is no longer an interoperability layer—it is an institution. This essay adopts a fractal governance posture instead: each DAO remains a local center of authority, but can form coalitions, share commitments, and coordinate execution through shared interfaces.

Permissionlessness is a core constraint in that posture, but it is easy to misunderstand. Here it does not mean the absence of rules; it means the absence of centralized gatekeepers. A DAO should not need approval from a parent DAO, foundation, or protocol maintainer to join cross-chain coordination. Instead, it should be able to opt in by deploying or enabling the relevant contracts, define its own validation and security assumptions, and modify or exit participation without external consent. Hyperlane’s architecture is well aligned with this principle because it is designed so that anyone can deploy and use the messaging layer, and applications can choose security modules that fit their requirements.

A second constraint is composability. Governance coordination should not require bespoke logic every time two DAOs collaborate. The system should express commitments in a standardized language so that multiple DAOs can reuse the same primitives: commitments that are conditional, commitments that are multi-party, and commitments that can be executed on different chains under different local rules.

At the transport layer, the framework uses Hyperlane to transmit messages across chains. Hyperlane is a permissionless interoperability protocol that supports cross-chain messaging, and it explicitly allows developers to customize how messages are verified on the destination chain via Interchain Security Modules (ISMs). That combination—permissionless deployment and application-defined security—matters for governance, because DAOs are rarely willing to share identical trust assumptions.

In this framework, Hyperlane is primarily a carrier of governance signals rather than a generic “asset bridge.” This is a deliberate choice. Asset movement tends to concentrate risk; governance signaling can be incremental. A DAO can begin by receiving informational messages about another DAO’s votes, or by receiving a signed commitment that it may choose to act on later. In other words, the first step is not “move money cross-chain,” but “move decisions cross-chain,” and only then make execution safe and explicit.

Transport alone does not solve coordination. DAOs also need a shared language for what messages mean. That is where intent-based design becomes useful. The Open Intents Framework (OIF) formalizes cross-chain “intents” as declarative statements of desired outcomes, paired with a modular stack for deploying, discovering, and solving those intents. OIF is presented as a full-stack framework for permissionless cross-chain intents, and it provides open-source contracts and reference infrastructure that developers can adapt.

For governance, the conceptual shift is this: rather than voting on low-level transaction data that is tightly coupled to one chain’s execution details, a DAO can vote on an outcome. An intent can express that outcome in a standardized form, such as authorizing a contribution to a joint initiative, committing to participate in a coordinated vote, or approving an action that should only execute if a partner DAO also approves a complementary commitment.

A concrete example makes the value clearer. Imagine two Builder DAOs that want to co-fund a public goods effort, but neither wants to wire funds to a shared multisig. Each DAO can pass a proposal that emits an intent: “allocate X from treasury to initiative Y, contingent on DAO B allocating at least X under the same terms.” Those intents can be relayed cross-chain. Once both intents exist and are validated, local execution contracts on each chain can release funds from each DAO’s own treasury. Coordination is achieved without custodial pooling, and each DAO remains the final authority over its own assets.

When Hyperlane and intents are combined, a canonical coordination loop emerges. A DAO proposes a cross-chain collaboration using its existing governance system. Builder governance is designed to be fully onchain and transparent: token holders create proposals, vote, and—when passed—execute actions through the governor and treasury contracts.

Under this framework, a passed proposal emits an intent object that captures the approved outcome. That intent is then transmitted to other chains or counterpart DAOs via Hyperlane. On the receiving side, nothing about receipt forces execution. A receiving DAO may treat the message as informational, use it to trigger its own local vote, or allow an execution adapter to act automatically if and only if predefined constraints are satisfied.

This non-coercive structure is essential. It prevents coordination from becoming remote control. Cross-chain messages do not replace local governance; they give local governance more expressive ways to collaborate.

One of the most immediate and practical use cases is chain-agnostic participation in Builder DAO governance by DAOs deployed on Nouns Builder. As the Builder ecosystem expands across EVM chains, the risk is that governance becomes chain-siloed: DAOs may share the Builder substrate and align culturally, yet become practically excluded from collective decision-making due to where they are deployed.

An intent-and-messaging approach reframes participation as an outcome rather than a transaction. A DAO can originate a vote or a structured signal on its home chain, validate it locally, and relay it into Builder DAO’s governance context as a standardized governance intent. The crucial idea is that governance participation can be expressed and transported without requiring every DAO to migrate its entire community or duplicate governance infrastructure on a single “home chain.”

This does not imply that Builder DAO must accept every signal blindly. It can define what kinds of intents it recognizes and what validation rules apply. But it does allow the ecosystem to pursue inclusivity without centralizing execution.

The longer-term ambition is to make Builder DAOs network-native across a multi-chain environment that increasingly behaves like a coordinated stack of EVM chains. In the Optimism ecosystem, for example, “Superchain interoperability” is described as an OP Stack capability that aims to make a network of chains feel like a single blockchain through trust-minimized cross-chain composability.

Intent-based governance fits naturally into such a world. If DAOs can express policies as intents—such as rebalancing treasury allocations across chains, routing revenue to specific initiatives, or authorizing programmatic disbursements—then execution can occur locally on each chain while remaining governed by shared decisions. The DAO is no longer bound to one chain’s treasury; it can hold and manage assets across multiple execution environments while remaining legible and accountable to its members.

This is the meaning of “articulate” asset management across the Superstack: a DAO can act precisely across chains because it has a standardized way to declare outcomes, verify messages, and execute under local constraints.

A credible design needs a credible starting point. The proposed on-ramp for implementation is the Nouns World Bridge: a minimal, governance-first deployment that proves the framework’s core claims before expanding into heavier-weight execution.

In its first phase, the Nouns World Bridge ( NWB) focuses on cross-chain governance signaling rather than generalized asset transfer. It defines an intent schema suitable for DAO commitments and governance participation, wires a small set of target chains via Hyperlane, and provides lightweight adapters for Builder DAOs to emit and receive these standardized intents. Hyperlane’s own documentation emphasizes permissionless deployment and modular security for applications, which supports the idea that early deployments can begin with conservative validation rules and gradually evolve.

Once signaling is stable, the bridge can grow into controlled execution: adapters that perform limited actions (for example, disbursing funds to known contracts or triggering predefined module updates) only when intents satisfy the DAO’s required constraints. Over time, additional intent types and execution surfaces can be introduced, turning the Nouns World Bridge into a practical coordination fabric for Builder DAOs and aligned Nounish communities.

The hardest part of multi-DAO ecosystems is not deploying more DAOs; it is coordinating them without recreating the centralized institutions DAOs were meant to replace. The framework described here shows one path toward coordination without centralization by combining Hyperlane’s permissionless cross-chain messaging with the Open Intents Framework’s outcome-oriented abstraction.

By treating cross-chain collaboration as a set of declarative commitments—intents—carried by a transport layer that supports application-defined security, DAOs can coordinate across chains while preserving local autonomy. The most immediate payoff is inclusive, chain-agnostic participation in Builder DAO governance. The longer-term payoff is a path toward DAOs that can manage assets and execute policy across the EVM Superstack with precision and accountability.

This essay presents a design and research articulation of an inter-DAO governance and coordination framework intended for DAOs operating on the Nouns Builder Protocol (nouns.build) and the wider ecosystem of Nounish and forked DAOs. The framework combines Hyperlane’s permissionless Layer 0 cross-chain messaging with the Open Intents Framework’s declarative “intent” abstraction to enable coordination and governance actions across chains without compromising DAO sovereignty. Rather than proposing a single unified meta-DAO or centralized bridge, the design emphasizes a fractal model in which autonomous DAOs can collaborate through standardized messages and outcomes while remaining independently governed. The essay closes with a pragmatic implementation on-ramp—the Nouns World Bridge—as a minimal deployment that validates core ideas first, then expands toward richer cross-chain execution and Superstack-wide operations.

The Nouns ecosystem showed that a strong cultural primitive, paired with onchain auction funding and transparent governance, can support sustained collective action. Nouns Builder extends that pattern into a protocol and deployment platform: communities can launch DAOs quickly using modular, onchain components—auction logic, membership/voting tokens, proposal governance, and a treasury that executes approved actions—without custom engineering for the fundamentals of “DAO plumbing.”

The payoff of this modularity is scale. Many independent communities can form around distinct missions and aesthetics while sharing a recognizable governance substrate. But the cost of plurality is coordination. As more Builder DAOs emerge—and as Nounish forks deploy across multiple EVM chains—collaboration increasingly depends on offchain social coordination: Discord threads, ad hoc working groups, and trusted multisigs for execution. Those methods are workable at small scale, yet brittle under growth: they are slow, hard to audit, and place disproportionate power in operational intermediaries.

The design problem is therefore not “how to centralize governance,” but how to allow independent DAOs to coordinate without abandoning the things that make them independent. The goal of this framework is to make sovereignty composable: to let DAOs collaborate across chains through verifiable signals and standardized commitments, while preserving each DAO’s ability to decide what it will accept, how it will validate it, and whether it will execute anything at all.

Inter-DAO coordination tends to fail when it quietly introduces hierarchy. If one DAO must approve another’s participation, or if a single committee maintains an allowlist of “valid” participants, then the system is no longer an interoperability layer—it is an institution. This essay adopts a fractal governance posture instead: each DAO remains a local center of authority, but can form coalitions, share commitments, and coordinate execution through shared interfaces.

Permissionlessness is a core constraint in that posture, but it is easy to misunderstand. Here it does not mean the absence of rules; it means the absence of centralized gatekeepers. A DAO should not need approval from a parent DAO, foundation, or protocol maintainer to join cross-chain coordination. Instead, it should be able to opt in by deploying or enabling the relevant contracts, define its own validation and security assumptions, and modify or exit participation without external consent. Hyperlane’s architecture is well aligned with this principle because it is designed so that anyone can deploy and use the messaging layer, and applications can choose security modules that fit their requirements.

A second constraint is composability. Governance coordination should not require bespoke logic every time two DAOs collaborate. The system should express commitments in a standardized language so that multiple DAOs can reuse the same primitives: commitments that are conditional, commitments that are multi-party, and commitments that can be executed on different chains under different local rules.

At the transport layer, the framework uses Hyperlane to transmit messages across chains. Hyperlane is a permissionless interoperability protocol that supports cross-chain messaging, and it explicitly allows developers to customize how messages are verified on the destination chain via Interchain Security Modules (ISMs). That combination—permissionless deployment and application-defined security—matters for governance, because DAOs are rarely willing to share identical trust assumptions.

In this framework, Hyperlane is primarily a carrier of governance signals rather than a generic “asset bridge.” This is a deliberate choice. Asset movement tends to concentrate risk; governance signaling can be incremental. A DAO can begin by receiving informational messages about another DAO’s votes, or by receiving a signed commitment that it may choose to act on later. In other words, the first step is not “move money cross-chain,” but “move decisions cross-chain,” and only then make execution safe and explicit.

Transport alone does not solve coordination. DAOs also need a shared language for what messages mean. That is where intent-based design becomes useful. The Open Intents Framework (OIF) formalizes cross-chain “intents” as declarative statements of desired outcomes, paired with a modular stack for deploying, discovering, and solving those intents. OIF is presented as a full-stack framework for permissionless cross-chain intents, and it provides open-source contracts and reference infrastructure that developers can adapt.

For governance, the conceptual shift is this: rather than voting on low-level transaction data that is tightly coupled to one chain’s execution details, a DAO can vote on an outcome. An intent can express that outcome in a standardized form, such as authorizing a contribution to a joint initiative, committing to participate in a coordinated vote, or approving an action that should only execute if a partner DAO also approves a complementary commitment.

A concrete example makes the value clearer. Imagine two Builder DAOs that want to co-fund a public goods effort, but neither wants to wire funds to a shared multisig. Each DAO can pass a proposal that emits an intent: “allocate X from treasury to initiative Y, contingent on DAO B allocating at least X under the same terms.” Those intents can be relayed cross-chain. Once both intents exist and are validated, local execution contracts on each chain can release funds from each DAO’s own treasury. Coordination is achieved without custodial pooling, and each DAO remains the final authority over its own assets.

When Hyperlane and intents are combined, a canonical coordination loop emerges. A DAO proposes a cross-chain collaboration using its existing governance system. Builder governance is designed to be fully onchain and transparent: token holders create proposals, vote, and—when passed—execute actions through the governor and treasury contracts.

Under this framework, a passed proposal emits an intent object that captures the approved outcome. That intent is then transmitted to other chains or counterpart DAOs via Hyperlane. On the receiving side, nothing about receipt forces execution. A receiving DAO may treat the message as informational, use it to trigger its own local vote, or allow an execution adapter to act automatically if and only if predefined constraints are satisfied.

This non-coercive structure is essential. It prevents coordination from becoming remote control. Cross-chain messages do not replace local governance; they give local governance more expressive ways to collaborate.

One of the most immediate and practical use cases is chain-agnostic participation in Builder DAO governance by DAOs deployed on Nouns Builder. As the Builder ecosystem expands across EVM chains, the risk is that governance becomes chain-siloed: DAOs may share the Builder substrate and align culturally, yet become practically excluded from collective decision-making due to where they are deployed.

An intent-and-messaging approach reframes participation as an outcome rather than a transaction. A DAO can originate a vote or a structured signal on its home chain, validate it locally, and relay it into Builder DAO’s governance context as a standardized governance intent. The crucial idea is that governance participation can be expressed and transported without requiring every DAO to migrate its entire community or duplicate governance infrastructure on a single “home chain.”

This does not imply that Builder DAO must accept every signal blindly. It can define what kinds of intents it recognizes and what validation rules apply. But it does allow the ecosystem to pursue inclusivity without centralizing execution.

The longer-term ambition is to make Builder DAOs network-native across a multi-chain environment that increasingly behaves like a coordinated stack of EVM chains. In the Optimism ecosystem, for example, “Superchain interoperability” is described as an OP Stack capability that aims to make a network of chains feel like a single blockchain through trust-minimized cross-chain composability.

Intent-based governance fits naturally into such a world. If DAOs can express policies as intents—such as rebalancing treasury allocations across chains, routing revenue to specific initiatives, or authorizing programmatic disbursements—then execution can occur locally on each chain while remaining governed by shared decisions. The DAO is no longer bound to one chain’s treasury; it can hold and manage assets across multiple execution environments while remaining legible and accountable to its members.

This is the meaning of “articulate” asset management across the Superstack: a DAO can act precisely across chains because it has a standardized way to declare outcomes, verify messages, and execute under local constraints.

A credible design needs a credible starting point. The proposed on-ramp for implementation is the Nouns World Bridge: a minimal, governance-first deployment that proves the framework’s core claims before expanding into heavier-weight execution.

In its first phase, the Nouns World Bridge ( NWB) focuses on cross-chain governance signaling rather than generalized asset transfer. It defines an intent schema suitable for DAO commitments and governance participation, wires a small set of target chains via Hyperlane, and provides lightweight adapters for Builder DAOs to emit and receive these standardized intents. Hyperlane’s own documentation emphasizes permissionless deployment and modular security for applications, which supports the idea that early deployments can begin with conservative validation rules and gradually evolve.

Once signaling is stable, the bridge can grow into controlled execution: adapters that perform limited actions (for example, disbursing funds to known contracts or triggering predefined module updates) only when intents satisfy the DAO’s required constraints. Over time, additional intent types and execution surfaces can be introduced, turning the Nouns World Bridge into a practical coordination fabric for Builder DAOs and aligned Nounish communities.

The hardest part of multi-DAO ecosystems is not deploying more DAOs; it is coordinating them without recreating the centralized institutions DAOs were meant to replace. The framework described here shows one path toward coordination without centralization by combining Hyperlane’s permissionless cross-chain messaging with the Open Intents Framework’s outcome-oriented abstraction.

By treating cross-chain collaboration as a set of declarative commitments—intents—carried by a transport layer that supports application-defined security, DAOs can coordinate across chains while preserving local autonomy. The most immediate payoff is inclusive, chain-agnostic participation in Builder DAO governance. The longer-term payoff is a path toward DAOs that can manage assets and execute policy across the EVM Superstack with precision and accountability.