Why this Week Matters
Configurable Governance
Pod Treasuries V3
Password Vault — End-to-End Encrypted
Improved Role Permissions / Delegation
Self-Hosted Video Infrastructure
Design Improvements
Upcoming events
We have several mid-stage conversations happening right now with communities preparing to onboard. Before they arrive, we needed to answer a question that's been on our roadmap for months: can the platform actually meet each community on its own terms, with its own governance rules, its own trust thresholds, its own way of deciding who controls what?
As of this week, the answer is yes. What follows is the heaviest infrastructure push we've shipped to date.
The platform's previous governance model assumed every pod operated the same way: 67% leader approval, no quorum check, 72-hour voting period. It was always intended to be a starter framework, with the ideal of deeper degrees of customization planned from day one. It's now here and live!
Pod leaders now configure four settings, separately for routine operational decisions (off-chain) and treasury-binding (on-chain) :
Quorum — what share of eligible voters must participate for a result to count. A proposal passing 3-to-1 doesn't mean much if 46 out of 50 eligible voters stayed silent. Quorum gives that absence weight.
Approval threshold — of votes cast, what share must be yes. Pods can choose 50%+1, two-thirds, three-quarters, or any custom value up to unanimity.
Voting period — anywhere from 12 hours for urgent decisions to 30 days for ones that need real deliberation.
Voter pool — all pod members vote by default, but leaders can narrow operational decisions to a leader council if their pod prefers that model.
Individual proposal authors can opt up to a stricter threshold when a particular decision warrants it, but never below the pod's default. This prevents the failure mode where someone quietly lowers the bar to pass a controversial vote.
Three guardrails remain platform-wide: approval can never drop below 50%+1, quorum can never drop below 20%, and voting periods stay between 12 hours and 30 days. Pods govern themselves, but the platform protects against governance becoming meaningless or weaponized by a bad actor.
Governance is also now a toggleable module. Pods that delegate decisions to a parent pod or operate informally can turn it off entirely without affecting their treasury, forums, chat, or any other capability.
And one more thing: the DAO's own rules are now tunable through the same process they enforce. Executive Pod members can draft a proposal to change the on-chain Governor's voting parameters, and that proposal goes to the full Advocate membership for ratification. The constitution rewrites itself through the same mechanism it enforces, no admin override, no contract upgrade key.
Until this week, every pod treasury used the same approval rule: simple majority (50.1+%). It worked, but it didn't reflect how every pod actually wants to operate. A working group of three friends might be fine with simple majority. A treasury managing larger funds might want a supermajority. A small committee handling sensitive operations might want full consensus.
New pods now choose their approval threshold at creation: Simple, Strict, Unanimous, or a custom percentage between 51% and 100%. The floor is enforced by the smart contract, and the threshold can be changed later through the same approval process that governs the treasury itself.
The on-chain architecture took three rounds of security review. It preserves pod self-sovereignty, no admin can block a pod from deploying its treasury, while preventing identity squatting.
If you're a pod leader, look for the "Deploy Treasury" button on your pod page.
Every active pod now has a built-in password vault. Pod leaders enable it with one click, choose which roles can see each saved credential, and members access what they need with a tap.
The important part: everything is encrypted in your browser before it ever reaches our servers. SpiritDAO operators with full database access cannot read your pod's passwords. It is a security-first infrastructure. Your encryption key is derived from a wallet signature that never leaves your browser. Our servers store only ciphertext and wrapped keys that are meaningless without the matching private key. It's the same security model as Signal and Proton Mail.
When a new member joins, existing leaders re-encrypt the relevant keys for them with one click. When someone leaves, the vault rotates automatically, the departed member loses future access, and every entry is re-encrypted under fresh keys.
We built this because pods accumulate credentials. The newsletter scheduler login, the shared Google Workspace, the Stripe key. Today those live in DMs, screenshots, and "ask Sarah." We needed this for the Executive Pod, and knew that other communities would benefit as well, so we built it!
The old permissions model was binary: you're a pod leader and can do everything, or you're a member and can do nothing administrative. That stopped working the moment we started shipping features where a pod might want one person to own a capability without giving them the keys to everything else.
Pod leaders now assign granular permissions organized into three categories: Core (the always-on capabilities like chat, forum, governance, treasury), Add-ons (optional modules like Surveys and Password Vault), and Paid (modules with billing implications like the AI Agent). The management interface adapts to each member's actual permissions, if your role has password management access, you see the Passwords tab and nothing else.
This means a pod can now cleanly express roles like a Marketing Manager who handles shared logins and marketplace listings but can't touch treasury. Or an Auditor who sees balances and transaction history in read-only mode. Or a Steward who configures the AI agent and moderates forums but has no control over money or membership. None of these required new code, they're combinations of existing permission flags that the interface now honors.
Billing for paid modules stays leader-only. Spend authority belongs to leaders. Everything else can be delegated with precision.
As we prepare to welcome anchor communities, we migrated our in-app video calling from a metered third-party service to our own dedicated server. The cost is now a flat ~$8/month regardless of how many calls happen, replacing a bill that would have grown with every meeting.
This keeps the platform free for communities while protecting our donation runway. One more piece of infrastructure that scales with our communities without scaling our overhead.
A special thank you to SpiritDAO member Fluran Zen for sharing this technical insight with us!
Notification improvements. You'll now see who messaged you at a glance — name cards with avatars appear in your notification list and DM alerts instead of wallet addresses. The notification page also updates in real time as new alerts arrive, so messages no longer require a refresh to surface. We wanted these fixes landed before more communities come online and rely on these signals to stay connected.
Direct messaging redesign. The DM interface has been updated to align with the platform's current visual direction.
We strongly recommend registering for events within the SpiritDAO app (Events section) at app.spiritdao.org, it's how we gauge attendance and shape the flow of each session.
Town Hall — Mon, May 25th · 8:00 PM EST - A standing community gathering for conversation, questions, and shared presence. Join here
First Contact — Wed, May 27th · 12:00 PM EST - The official starting point for new members — a peer-to-peer orientation into how participation works. Join here
Feedback Loops — Fri, May 29th · 12:00 PM EST - A live working session where the community helps shape the app — bring your bugs, your questions, and your ideas. Join here
The best way to get in touch is within our community: https://app.spiritdao.org
If it's easier, send us an email: community@spiritdao.org
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