Large organizations are slothful. The hierarchical order produces inefficient use of our time and resources. Considering the world has shifted unwittingly into the future landscape of the 21st century kicking and screaming. It’s 20th century organizational structure in time has passed.

Telework has arrived into our consciousness and now we must adapt with the tools we have designed or build new ones to be more lightweight and efficient. Tools that will make us and the organizations we build more productive and have more personal intrinsic value. Imagine, deriving value from what we do—other than a paycheck. We are the vanguards of an epic reconstruction of organizational systems and how we can interchange information and ideas within them.

From currency to exchanges to virtual realities and metaverses. It seems to be everywhere. Like most new fields when they are in their growth stage; it is full of admirations, as well as the concerns. It was one of the general constructs of the Internet design and yet somehow the decentralization got hijacked in Web2. Yet, like a pop star after rehab it’s back and in the limelight again in Web3.

Specifically, we are exploring Decentralized Automous Organizations, also known as DAOs. As already mentioned, within large organizational systems there has existed hierarchical structures that become uneconomical and ineffective the larger they get. According to a paper published in 2005, we tend to naturally form groups in sizes ranging from 3-5, 9-15, and 30-45. This is an optimal self organizing mechanism that provides a pathway to efficiency. Apple has been using this organizational structure in their company for years. In most other large organizations, the constraints come from executive management and trickle down to senior managers and disseminated throughout the organization. Depending on the size of the organization the teams vary from the optimal ranges mentioned earlier to hundreds and sometimes even thousands. Obviously, the bigger the organization, the more proper channels and the slower the information is approved, shared, and executed.

So—what happens when you move the office to remote and end up with a diversification of contributing stakeholders across the globe? How do you design a new framework for this ecosystem? How do teams orchestrate within this new framework?

First written about by Vitalik Buterin, the inventor of Ethereum. A DAO seeks to decentralize governance and ownership. It is designed for the creation of value towards a shared purpose. With governance and ownership at the helm of a DAO it keeps the project’s direction on course and the contributors profit when it is successful. This is accomplished by giving ownership to the people who create the value within that environment.

Let’s say, you are a member in a DAO. You provide value with your unique set of experiences and skills in the project. Compensation is returned in the form of a token specific to that DAO project. Normally a token is valueless. Yet, when it is able to be exchanged for a cryptocurrency like Ethereum or DAI, it now has a value. If that token can also be leveraged towards an influence in the direction of the project, such as an ability to vote on proposals submitted by the community. Not only do you have an invested core team but you’ve built a community around the project, bringing that project one step closer to being successful.

This is all great but it’s far from a Utopian design. DAOs have their share of problems. Whether it’s treasury funds being hacked or other nefarious ways upon which people try to manipulate votes on proposals. DAOs also have a self imposed size limit of around 100. Imperfect? Yes. It is the future of organizations though? That is also an overwhelming yes.

So here we are working in a DAO and we have been successful in building a community and everything appears to be operating smoothly. What happens if we are so successful that we hit the suggested stakeholders limit of a DAO?

This is where a new design in DAOs comes in, the Orca Protocol. In Orca Protocol you can scale your DAO as needed. If a point is reached where your community thinks that it would be beneficial to have a smaller team work on another project that creates value for the DAO then you can create a new DAO using the Orca protocol. A DAO within a DAO.

Let’s say we start off our DAO with a small group of people and we start to grow our contributors, core team, and community. We realize that maybe everyone doesn’t really need to vote in the technical direction in a proposal, they might lack the technical understanding or wasn’t able to research the requirements on a particular tech stack to decide. What do we do? Do we let the proposal be voted upon by those who aren’t up on the advancements in technology? Governance proposals shouldn’t be driven by those with more tokens but a lack of understanding or time requirements needed to gain the knowledge to make a good decision. Or maybe you want to start a Creator DAO but are unsure of who your contributors are in the beginning. It’s possible that someone in the community purchased enough of your social tokens to have a large influence on proposals with their votes.

Orca’s protocol solution is called a pod. Pods potential lies in that subset design of a DAO mentioned earlier. You can declare the requirements to appoint DAO members to a new pod that deals with more specific areas, such as tech stacks, and allocate the resources needed to accomplish that function and necessary engagement. These DAO pods are not just a splinter of the main DAO but are a DAO within themselves, with an ability to have it’s own set of tokenomics, governance design, and treasury. The Orca protocol pod design also incorporate the use of NFTs as an access credential to a member’s appointed DAO. Which makes for very interesting use cases including possible cybersecurity solutions for DAO hacks or take overs. The DAO pod could also provide a path for onboarding new contributors and a measurement of their engagement within in the community. DAO pods are a seemingly simple solution to a variety of issues including the pitfalls of larger organization problems, governance input, and voting issues.

I really am excited about the possibilities of how the Orca Protocol evolves into the killer DAO apps I think it can be. Currently, it’s in private beta. So, we shall see, once it’s released into the wild, what amazing autonomous organizations will be built using their protocol.