Say hello to Powerhouse, where the future of decentralized operations begins. As pioneers in building and scaling the oldest and largest DAO (MakerDAO), Powerhouse understands the challenges faced by open organizations today but also recognizes the promise of DAOs to redefine the future of work.

Powerhouse’s mission is to build a universal DAO toolkit with open-source software that optimizes the operations of open organizations. While governance focuses on what a DAO should do, Powerhouse is focused on how it executes its vision in the most efficient way once it's decided what to do.

Powerhouse’s ultimate vision is to scale organizations through transparency and programmable operations, translating business processes into software that bakes in an organizational best practices into software and enables AI automation and DAO collective intelligence.

Powerhouse traces its roots to MakerDAO’s Sustainable Ecosystem Scaling Core Unit (SES), which was tasked with building out the operational capabilities of MakerDAO after the Maker Foundation was sunset in 2021. Powerhouse (as the SES) established operational processes to ensure software tools to ensure greater transparency into the workings of MakerDAO, most notably through the MakerDAO Expense Dashboard.

Powerhouse also saw firsthand how chaotic, disorganized and bureaucratic a DAO can be without established hierarchies and reporting mechanisms. During its time as the SES Core Unit, Powerhouse established processes for budgets, scope of work, stakeholder alignment and other business analyses that help to coordinate contributors and service providers and ensure accountability to governance.

This experience with MakerDAO informed the creation of Powerhouse, recognizing that these were not unique issues to MakerDAO but issues plaguing all DAOs. Existing solutions did not understand the problem set nor did they have a software stack that was decentralized and able to scale to rival the network size of established Web2 giants.

Powerhouse has four products live in production: Fusion, Connect, Renown and Switchboard.

The product suite has been imagined as a Universal DAO Toolkit. This means the products are foundational building blocks that organizations can use to customize to their specific needs. As such, the Powerhouse products are first and foremost, developer-facing products that will be used to create operational processes for large organizations to interact with contributors, community members and users. 

For instance, Fusion is the dashboard and public visualization tool; it can be tailored to display the information important for a community or a highly informed operator or governance specialist. Switchboard, meanwhile, is a tool for a data scientist to go further than the public dashboards in querying organizational data. It’s also where AI can plug in through automating actions based on certain data parameters.

Renown is a key tool that will be used by organizations to manage ownership and document access control. Almost all DAOs already have authorized addresses on multi-sigs and Renown extends this to documents and data.

Connect is the tool used for data input. It is a document editor for theoretically any type of data but most of the time, it will be used as a mini web application. One could also think of it as a smart form, where a simple UI can be created to gather relevant data from contributors, community members, grant recipients etc. 

These tools allow organizations to create customized software with a consistent data structure and retrieval and end-to-end secure data input.

These tools allow organizations to create customized software with a consistent data structure and retrieval and end-to-end secure data input.

These products work seamlessly together and share several common technologies between them, particularly Fusion, Connect & Switchboard. Three key technologies tie these products together:

Document models are a common architecture and design choice for complex systems when dealing with structured data. All data in Powerhouse is structured as a document model, which means it comes as a pre-loaded template with certain rules baked in. Document models ensure that organizational best practices are embedded into software. This ensures less friction in onboarding new contributors and provides appropriate boundaries for long-term contributors to prevent errors. This helps move management from “Don’t mess up” to “Can’t mess up”.

Document models can also be reused or forked. Common organizational tools from payroll, grants program management to a DAO address book can all be built as a document model. Other organizations can leverage these existing packages in Powerhouse’s “app store” or build additional features for their organization's needs.

Document models will also be favorites of front-end developers because of how easy it is to create React.js web applications from document models

The second key technology Powerhouse employs is an event-driven architecture (also referred to as event sourcing). To change a document model, rather than store a new state, the changes are noted by publishing events (or operations) of the specific updates to the document. When viewing the document, all operations (or events) are performed and the end state is the current version of the document. This is similar to Google docs, where every keystroke is marked as an edit that can be viewed and previous versions can be restored. In Powerhouse, every action has a corresponding operation, which is similar to a blockchain transaction.

This is the ideal structure for documents that will be collaborated on by different individuals because each change is represented as an operation with a timestamp including who made the change. 

The events-driven architecture of Powerhouse also works like git, where a branch could be forked and worked on independently but then merged into the main branch later.

Many DAOs operate on Google’s Office Product Suite because it allows for easy, simultaneous editing of spreadsheets, word processing and all documents. Never mind this means ceding DAO sovereignty to the googlers in Mountain View. Powerhouse architecture is built to allow this same collaboration but without the centralized servers, enabling P2P coordination with P2P communication. 

Using events-driven architecture means that only new operations need to be synced, rather than the entire state. Powerhouse's DocSync protocol enables real-time collaboration while also having git-style push, pull and merge for syncing larger amounts of data.

In addition to the Powerhouse software stack, we are pioneering new legal infrastructure to ensure decentralized organizations remain compliant and decentralized. At the end of the day, DAOs are powered by real people operating in jurisdictions around the world. Ultimately, if DAOs want to be an alternative to the centralized tech giants, they will need to hire the best engineers/marketers/operators and have a legal avenue for collecting revenue from around the world.

To that end, Powerhouse proposes a new model for open organizations that incorporates DAOs into a larger structure that includes offchain legal entities. We call these Scalable Network Organizations (SNO). SNOs require new software infrastructure that is decentralized as well as open-source legal templates for establishing and linking offchain processes together with onchain governance.

This model connects:

• DAO - onchain organization with wide, distributed ownership

• Operational Hub - how individuals and other DAO service providers get paid in compliant way

• Operational Collateral Fund - conduit for investors to invest in promising projects based on operational capability and future revenue 

• Revenue Generating Hub - the sales arm of the SNO, responsible for taking in fiat revenue or other consumer facing needs

• IP-holding entity - a legal entity that just holds the IP of the SNO, similar to the Dai foundation

Powerhouse’s ambition is that SNOs can be the structure that builds a decentralized, Uber, Etsy or other software-based marketplaces, where a centralized entity has complete control over a network, rather than those who power the network.

Powerhouse’s four core products are already in production, while another Academy, an educational onboarding tool, is still under development. We are currently working with MakerDAO on building a Real World Asset (RWA) portfolio reporting tool for Arrangers to use when submitting information on the RWAs that back the Dai stablecoin. This ensures that the data is only submitted by authorized individuals and gives a transparent look into the offchain collateral backing Dai.

Powerhouse has also been working with StableLab and Arbitrum on the launch of Arbgrants.com. It uses Connect for ARB grantees to submit ongoing incentive reports, which can be monitored by the Grants Council and Program Manager.

We are further building out our infrastructure stack and optimizing performance as well as refining the legal infrastructure and business model for SNOs. We would love to chat with folks interested in building along with us. Jump into our Discord, follow us on X and learn more at our website.