In December of 2022 Vitalik wrote a post titled What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me. He discusses four classes of applications that have shown potential already on Ethereum: money, DeFi, identity, and DAO’s. For each, he highlights the key developments over the past several years and the challenges that each face as they mature. At Ethereans Labs, years have been spent building the framework and tooling for the final entry in that list: DAO’s. The robust and granular structure developed for Organizations addresses many of the general needs of DAO’s laid out in the article while offering scalability and flexibility to match the specific needs of a particular group, project, collective, or nation.

To address the points brought up by the article we need to get a brief overview of the structure of Organizations. The core of an Organization is a basic contract that simply maintains a list of attached Component contracts. It also contains a generic function called submit that allows the Organization to execute any function stored in a separate contract.

The only necessary Component for an Organization is the Proposals Manager. This contract creates proposals, which must pass a vote in order to be executed. Different proposals can be configured with their own creation rules, stating who can create such a proposal, as well as voting rules regarding the tokens used to vote, their weights, and the amount of tokens necessary to pass the vote. The rules can be stored in their own separate contracts, allowing for innovative voting mechanisms to be interchanged and experimented with.

Additional Components can be written arbitrarily. For example, a useful Component is a Treasury Manager that stores an Organization’s funds and contains functions to transfer those funds.

Finally, an Organization can contain a subDAO Manager Component, which is the host of another more restricted Organization known as a subDAO. The subDAO has its own Proposals Manager, which can only create clones of proposal models stored in the subDAO. These proposals can be created by the public. For example, this may be used to determine the inflation rate of the Organization’s governance token or which assets are purchased for the investment fund.

Given this modular architecture, EthOS Organizations are maximally configurable DAOs. They can be created with multiple Components and subDAOs with various levels of power, governed by different tokens and/or committees.

Going back to the post from Vitalik:

A particular subtlety is that the word "decentralized" is sometimes used to refer to both: a governance structure is decentralized if its decisions depend on decisions taken from a large group of participants, and an implementation of a governance structure is decentralized if it is built on a decentralized structure like a blockchain and is not dependent on any single nation-state legal system.

He goes on to explain the reasons for decentralizing an organization: robustness, efficiency, and interoperability. The benefits of each are defined in the post respectively as: protection against attackers both internal and external to the protocol, having less friction than traditional legal frameworks, and modularity with other on-chain things. EthOS Organizations provides the framework and tools to decentralize in all of these ways.

One way to think about the distinction is: decentralized governance structure protects against attackers on the inside, and a decentralized implementation protects against powerful attackers on the outside ("censorship resistance").

The best way to be resistant to attacks from the outside is to rely on the security of Ethereum itself. Organizations are designed to exist fully on-chain, without the reliance of off-chain systems that have lower security budgets than Ethereum or could be controlled and regulated by the countries they exist in. In this way, the only viable attack vector from the outside is a direct assault on the blockchain. While sanctions surrounding funds mixers have reduced the number of validators willing to include certain transactions in blocks, those transactions are still included by other validators, revealing the resilience of truly decentralized implementations against these types of sanctions. The key design principle is that all changes to an Organization are carried out by on-chain proposals, so the Organization is maximally robust to external actors.

To protect against attacks from the inside, Organizations use a system of granular permissions, which allows Organizations to define which aspects of the protocol are able to be governed by either a host, token holders, or both. This is in combination with a two-layer model where certain templated decisions are made in the Governance layer using subDAOs, and the technological developments of the project occur in the Root layer, while each layer can be governed by different tokens. This structure allows Organizations to not only give complete control of certain aspects of a protocol to token holders, but also to allow the token holders to check and approve proposed structural and code changes to the Organization. Having this type of check on the ability for core developers to push updates to a protocol vastly improves the security against an inside attack, as it not only requires developer permissions and a token holder vote, but also introduces friction in to the process, giving time for major changes to be evaluated and discussed. Organizations can also be run exclusively by a small whitelisted dev team early in their life, when rapid changes and bug fixes may require speed and decisiveness, and transitioned to a more distributed power structure later on in the protocol’s life.

Governance decentralized for efficiency preserves the ability to act rapidly and pivot if needed, but tries to move decisions away from the top to avoid the organization becoming a sclerotic bureaucracy.

There are two main ways Organizations provides tools for decentralization for efficiency: granular permissions and delegations. The two-layer model and system of granular permissions is actually extended further in the implementation; the Governance layer can be comprised of an arbitrary number of subDAO’s, each with its own permissions system.

The ramifications of such granularity opens up intricate governance opportunities that allow for efficient decision making by committees and branches of a larger collective while leaving the robustness of the core functionality unaffected. For example, the the inflation rate of a token could be controlled by a committee that acts as the host for the Inflation subDAO, giving that committee full control over the one aspect of the protocol while leaving other functions either in the hands of token holders or the project development team. Quick action can be taken by the committee in response to external factors without risk to the core functionality of the project. Another committee could be the host of the Investment subDAO, with the ability to decide on the investing strategy of the Organization. This subDAO could be configured to have a token vote to approve the proposal set forth by the committee, all the while not affecting the permissions of the inflation committee. The quantity and permissions of these subDAOs can be modified as an Organization grows and matures, either breaking off governable aspects to host committees or turning control of aspects over from a developer team to token holders. This granular control is limited only by one’s imagination of what structure is conceivable.

Delegations are the other method that allows Organizations to decentralize for efficiency. Delegations are simple Organizations that are able to attach to Organizations, whose governance tokens are created by wrapping tokens from the main Organization to which they are attached. The amount of wrapped tokens determines the amount of grants received from the main Organization. While these technically exist outside an Organization, they offer a method for smaller groups to use funds for grassroots movements, specific integrations, and experimentation. They have a level of autonomy to act rapidly outside the established governance structure of an Organization while still having accountability to the Organization since they are dependent on token holders to support their delegation in order to receive grant funding from the main Organization.

Both of these systems are reminiscent of the pod-based governance model shown in Vitalik’s article, where ‘stuff gets done’ in pods separate from the core governance. Both the permissions system and delegations allows smaller groups to function as part of a larger organization while having some level of autonomy over specific aspects or funds that are granted to them by the Organization.

This is a fairly boring class of reasons to decentralize, but it's still important: it's easier and more secure for on-chain things to interact with other on-chain things, than with off-chain systems that would inevitably require an (attackable) bridge layer.

As mentioned in the Robustness section, Organizations are built entirely on-chain, inherently reducing the risk of interacting with off-chain entities. They were designed to interact with on-chain entities from the beginning and a considerable amount of thought has given to the way they connect with other on-chain entities.

Organizations utilize on-chain factories for routines. These routines are capable of performing transfers, mints, burns, and DEX swaps of assets. The Ethereans Organization utilizes a routine to once a day: mint new tokens, transfer some to a farming contract, sell the rest to the liquidity pool on Uniswap, and transfer the resulting ETH to various treasuries. In this way, the Organization is not reliant on an off-chain entity to perform the daily interactions, as the funds are interacted with by a contract that is automatically triggered for a small reward. Another routine is used for buying and selling tokens in the investment fund and new routines can be created to serve new and different functions as the need to interact with other on-chain entities arises.

Organizations were also designed alongside the Items protocol, a token superstandard that combines the functions of ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 tokens while incorporating on-chain dynamic metadata. Items allow the assets held by an Organization to be transferred and sold on both DEX’s and marketplaces, giving them access to all the potential markets in which to conduct business.

The final point raised in the article is the recent development in governance mechanisms, such as quadratic voting, Futarchy, and liquid democracy. In Organizations, the voting mechanism is simply a component of the organization, meaning it can be easily swapped out and is not a static part of the Organization. Any of the mentioned mechanisms could be coded as a component and that component attached to an Organization, changing the governance mechanism of an Organization without requiring a migration. Similarly, if new mechanisms are proposed in the future, they could also be coded as components and swapped in, even if they are conceived after the Organization is formed. In this way, Organizations can benefit from future development in the governance space. In this way, Organizations are powerfully designed to be flexible and incorporate future developments in the governance space.

EthereansOS Organizations provide both methods and tools for enabling the three different kinds of decentralization discussed. Their flexibility allows them to be molded to specific needs while retaining the desirable qualities that DAO’s have promised. They are a framework that can give rise to everything from glorified multi sigs to multi chambered governments built of dozens of committees and agencies working in tandem. The exciting DAO framework is here, they are called Organizations, and the contracts and tools are live right now. The documentation can be found here.

In December of 2022 Vitalik wrote a post titled What in the Ethereum application ecosystem excites me. He discusses four classes of applications that have shown potential already on Ethereum: money, DeFi, identity, and DAO’s. For each, he highlights the key developments over the past several years and the challenges that each face as they mature. At Ethereans Labs, years have been spent building the framework and tooling for the final entry in that list: DAO’s. The robust and granular structure developed for Organizations addresses many of the general needs of DAO’s laid out in the article while offering scalability and flexibility to match the specific needs of a particular group, project, collective, or nation.

To address the points brought up by the article we need to get a brief overview of the structure of Organizations. The core of an Organization is a basic contract that simply maintains a list of attached Component contracts. It also contains a generic function called submit that allows the Organization to execute any function stored in a separate contract.

The only necessary Component for an Organization is the Proposals Manager. This contract creates proposals, which must pass a vote in order to be executed. Different proposals can be configured with their own creation rules, stating who can create such a proposal, as well as voting rules regarding the tokens used to vote, their weights, and the amount of tokens necessary to pass the vote. The rules can be stored in their own separate contracts, allowing for innovative voting mechanisms to be interchanged and experimented with.

Additional Components can be written arbitrarily. For example, a useful Component is a Treasury Manager that stores an Organization’s funds and contains functions to transfer those funds.

Finally, an Organization can contain a subDAO Manager Component, which is the host of another more restricted Organization known as a subDAO. The subDAO has its own Proposals Manager, which can only create clones of proposal models stored in the subDAO. These proposals can be created by the public. For example, this may be used to determine the inflation rate of the Organization’s governance token or which assets are purchased for the investment fund.

Given this modular architecture, EthOS Organizations are maximally configurable DAOs. They can be created with multiple Components and subDAOs with various levels of power, governed by different tokens and/or committees.

Going back to the post from Vitalik:

A particular subtlety is that the word "decentralized" is sometimes used to refer to both: a governance structure is decentralized if its decisions depend on decisions taken from a large group of participants, and an implementation of a governance structure is decentralized if it is built on a decentralized structure like a blockchain and is not dependent on any single nation-state legal system.

He goes on to explain the reasons for decentralizing an organization: robustness, efficiency, and interoperability. The benefits of each are defined in the post respectively as: protection against attackers both internal and external to the protocol, having less friction than traditional legal frameworks, and modularity with other on-chain things. EthOS Organizations provides the framework and tools to decentralize in all of these ways.

One way to think about the distinction is: decentralized governance structure protects against attackers on the inside, and a decentralized implementation protects against powerful attackers on the outside ("censorship resistance").

The best way to be resistant to attacks from the outside is to rely on the security of Ethereum itself. Organizations are designed to exist fully on-chain, without the reliance of off-chain systems that have lower security budgets than Ethereum or could be controlled and regulated by the countries they exist in. In this way, the only viable attack vector from the outside is a direct assault on the blockchain. While sanctions surrounding funds mixers have reduced the number of validators willing to include certain transactions in blocks, those transactions are still included by other validators, revealing the resilience of truly decentralized implementations against these types of sanctions. The key design principle is that all changes to an Organization are carried out by on-chain proposals, so the Organization is maximally robust to external actors.

To protect against attacks from the inside, Organizations use a system of granular permissions, which allows Organizations to define which aspects of the protocol are able to be governed by either a host, token holders, or both. This is in combination with a two-layer model where certain templated decisions are made in the Governance layer using subDAOs, and the technological developments of the project occur in the Root layer, while each layer can be governed by different tokens. This structure allows Organizations to not only give complete control of certain aspects of a protocol to token holders, but also to allow the token holders to check and approve proposed structural and code changes to the Organization. Having this type of check on the ability for core developers to push updates to a protocol vastly improves the security against an inside attack, as it not only requires developer permissions and a token holder vote, but also introduces friction in to the process, giving time for major changes to be evaluated and discussed. Organizations can also be run exclusively by a small whitelisted dev team early in their life, when rapid changes and bug fixes may require speed and decisiveness, and transitioned to a more distributed power structure later on in the protocol’s life.

Governance decentralized for efficiency preserves the ability to act rapidly and pivot if needed, but tries to move decisions away from the top to avoid the organization becoming a sclerotic bureaucracy.

There are two main ways Organizations provides tools for decentralization for efficiency: granular permissions and delegations. The two-layer model and system of granular permissions is actually extended further in the implementation; the Governance layer can be comprised of an arbitrary number of subDAO’s, each with its own permissions system.

The ramifications of such granularity opens up intricate governance opportunities that allow for efficient decision making by committees and branches of a larger collective while leaving the robustness of the core functionality unaffected. For example, the the inflation rate of a token could be controlled by a committee that acts as the host for the Inflation subDAO, giving that committee full control over the one aspect of the protocol while leaving other functions either in the hands of token holders or the project development team. Quick action can be taken by the committee in response to external factors without risk to the core functionality of the project. Another committee could be the host of the Investment subDAO, with the ability to decide on the investing strategy of the Organization. This subDAO could be configured to have a token vote to approve the proposal set forth by the committee, all the while not affecting the permissions of the inflation committee. The quantity and permissions of these subDAOs can be modified as an Organization grows and matures, either breaking off governable aspects to host committees or turning control of aspects over from a developer team to token holders. This granular control is limited only by one’s imagination of what structure is conceivable.

Delegations are the other method that allows Organizations to decentralize for efficiency. Delegations are simple Organizations that are able to attach to Organizations, whose governance tokens are created by wrapping tokens from the main Organization to which they are attached. The amount of wrapped tokens determines the amount of grants received from the main Organization. While these technically exist outside an Organization, they offer a method for smaller groups to use funds for grassroots movements, specific integrations, and experimentation. They have a level of autonomy to act rapidly outside the established governance structure of an Organization while still having accountability to the Organization since they are dependent on token holders to support their delegation in order to receive grant funding from the main Organization.

Both of these systems are reminiscent of the pod-based governance model shown in Vitalik’s article, where ‘stuff gets done’ in pods separate from the core governance. Both the permissions system and delegations allows smaller groups to function as part of a larger organization while having some level of autonomy over specific aspects or funds that are granted to them by the Organization.

This is a fairly boring class of reasons to decentralize, but it's still important: it's easier and more secure for on-chain things to interact with other on-chain things, than with off-chain systems that would inevitably require an (attackable) bridge layer.

As mentioned in the Robustness section, Organizations are built entirely on-chain, inherently reducing the risk of interacting with off-chain entities. They were designed to interact with on-chain entities from the beginning and a considerable amount of thought has given to the way they connect with other on-chain entities.

Organizations utilize on-chain factories for routines. These routines are capable of performing transfers, mints, burns, and DEX swaps of assets. The Ethereans Organization utilizes a routine to once a day: mint new tokens, transfer some to a farming contract, sell the rest to the liquidity pool on Uniswap, and transfer the resulting ETH to various treasuries. In this way, the Organization is not reliant on an off-chain entity to perform the daily interactions, as the funds are interacted with by a contract that is automatically triggered for a small reward. Another routine is used for buying and selling tokens in the investment fund and new routines can be created to serve new and different functions as the need to interact with other on-chain entities arises.

Organizations were also designed alongside the Items protocol, a token superstandard that combines the functions of ERC-20, ERC-721, and ERC-1155 tokens while incorporating on-chain dynamic metadata. Items allow the assets held by an Organization to be transferred and sold on both DEX’s and marketplaces, giving them access to all the potential markets in which to conduct business.

The final point raised in the article is the recent development in governance mechanisms, such as quadratic voting, Futarchy, and liquid democracy. In Organizations, the voting mechanism is simply a component of the organization, meaning it can be easily swapped out and is not a static part of the Organization. Any of the mentioned mechanisms could be coded as a component and that component attached to an Organization, changing the governance mechanism of an Organization without requiring a migration. Similarly, if new mechanisms are proposed in the future, they could also be coded as components and swapped in, even if they are conceived after the Organization is formed. In this way, Organizations can benefit from future development in the governance space. In this way, Organizations are powerfully designed to be flexible and incorporate future developments in the governance space.

EthereansOS Organizations provide both methods and tools for enabling the three different kinds of decentralization discussed. Their flexibility allows them to be molded to specific needs while retaining the desirable qualities that DAO’s have promised. They are a framework that can give rise to everything from glorified multi sigs to multi chambered governments built of dozens of committees and agencies working in tandem. The exciting DAO framework is here, they are called Organizations, and the contracts and tools are live right now. The documentation can be found here.