When we talk about “onboarding the next billion into Ethereum,” we usually picture individual users getting wallets and sending their first transactions.
This individual-focused approach has driven most ecosystem development, abstracting Ethereum's complexity into browser and mobile wallets. While this approach serves individual users well, it overlooks a critical opportunity: entities or organizations that coordinate multiple people toward collective goals.
This creates an opportunity. Tools designed for collective action represents a highly leveraged entry point into the ecosystem: the millions of startups and small & medium enterprises (SMEs) that already exist, employ people, and move real economic value every day.
If we can make Ethereum a credible, low-friction environment for these organizations, we can speed up the onboarding of both collective and individual users at the same time. Every startup or SME that comes onchain brings its founders, teams, customers, and partners with it. That is the motivation behind this article and the work we have been doing as part of the Devconnect Scholars Program and at Zenbit.
In this article, we explore:
The context of startups and SMEs and why they are a natural “early majority” segment for Ethereum.
MicroDAOs as a minimum viable DAO pattern that combines five Ethereum primitives: ENS, Safe, DeFi, EAS, and a Company Token, with real-world examples like Axolotarium and AxoloDAO.
Startupchain, an integrated product that reduces UX friction by orchestrating all these tools in a single flow, starting from the prototype built at ETH New York and continued through the Startupchain PRD.
Globally, startups and SMEs represent the majority of firms as well as a large share of employment and GDP. Even in informality, they are the main vehicle to leverage economic opportunities for founders and entrepreneurs. Around 99% of companies worldwide are startups or SMEs, adding up to more than 391 million businesses. Over half are in Asia (51%), followed by Africa (23%), Europe (10%), North America (10%), South America (5%), and Oceania (1%). This distribution shows not only how massive the SME segment is, but also how geographically diverse it is. Any strategy to bring the real economy onchain must speak to this 99% and work across very different regions, levels of infrastructure, and regulatory realities.
Each of these types of organization offers different features that suit diverse contexts worldwide. Those able to leverage new technologies or business models may choose to found startups focused on rapid growth and long-term scalability, accepting higher risk as they build at the knowledge frontier. Small businesses, on the other hand, rely on proven models that deliver stable operations and more predictable profitability.
While there are notable differences between startups and small businesses, such as their goals, risk tolerance and time horizons, both profiles can benefit from onchain tools to:
Bootstrap trust and coordination among co-founders.
Manage shared treasuries and cashflow transparently.
Formalize relationships with collaborators, investors, and community.
Record IP, contributions, and milestones in a verifiable way.
This makes them ideal candidates for onchain coordination, especially in regions where traditional financial and legal infrastructure is slow, opaque, or exclusionary.
Because startups and SMEs already move significant economic value, onboarding them is not about speculation; it’s about the backbone of employment and production in every region of the world. Their impact on jobs is overwhelming: in Africa, startups and SMEs generate around 84% of employment, in South America and Europe about 70%, in Oceania 70%, in Asia 64%, and in North America 59%. In other words, most people who work in the formal economy do so in organizations that look much more like a small firm or startup than a multinational corporation.
At the same time, a substantial share of these startups and SMEs operate in the informal economy, which limits their access to credit, digital tools, and long-term planning. Approximately 38% of African startups and SMEs, 35% of those in South America, and 22% in Asia are informal, compared with 16% in North America, 15% in Europe, and 11% in Oceania. This means that some of the regions where startups and SMEs create the most jobs are also those where they are least integrated into formal financial and legal systems.
In many countries, especially in the Global South, this informality shows up as:
No clear legal entity or incorporation.
No structured cap table, vesting, or ownership records.
No formal agreements with collaborators.
Cash-based accounting with limited or no audit trail.
Because of this dual reality—central to employment but often structurally excluded—onboarding startups and SMEs to Ethereum is not just an efficiency upgrade. It is a way to:
Channel real-world revenue (payments, invoices, subscriptions) through open, programmable infrastructure.
Support real employment (payroll, contractor payments) with transparent treasuries and auditable flows.
Protect and monetize real assets and IP (licenses, patents, content, scientific data) with verifiable records.
Enable real community outcomes (education, conservation, local development) by making funding and governance legible and accountable.
If Ethereum wants to become a credible global settlement layer, it must support these everyday, “boring” business operations — especially in regions where the combination of high startup/SME employment and high informality reveals how fragile current coordination and finance rails really are.
Technology adoption rarely happens all at once. It follows a curve where different segments of users come in at different moments, each with their own needs and expectations. At the left side of the curve we find innovators (tech enthusiasts, ~2.5%), people who adopt new tools simply because they are new and are willing to tolerate bugs, rough edges, and missing features. Next come the early adopters (visionaries, ~13.5%), who see strategic advantage in being first and are willing to experiment as long as the upside is big enough.
These two groups form the early market. Most of Ethereum’s first decade has been dominated by them: protocol researchers, DeFi degens, NFT collectors, DAO-native teams — people who are happy to manage seed phrases, sign raw transactions, and compose protocols like Lego bricks.
Between this early market and the rest of society lies what Geoffrey Moore calls “the chasm”: a structural gap between what early adopters are willing to accept and what the mainstream market demands (Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, 1991). On the other side of the chasm sit the early majority (pragmatists, ~34%) and the late majority (conservatives, ~34%), followed by laggards (skeptics, ~16%). Pragmatists don’t care that a technology is new; they care that it works reliably, fits into their existing workflows, and clearly improves cost, speed, or risk. Conservatives and skeptics are even more demanding: they expect mature products, standards, and support.
In general, if a technology doesn’t evolve to meet the needs of the next segment, it fails to cross the chasm and remains a niche tool for enthusiasts. But if it adapts—by improving UX, hiding complexity, and solving specific, visible problems—it can bridge this gap and access a much broader market.
In the context of Ethereum, this means recognizing that:
DeFi degens, NFT collectors, and protocol-native teams map to the innovators and early adopters on the left side of the curve. They are comfortable juggling multiple wallets, interfaces, and protocols to compose their own solutions.
Startups and SMEs correspond to the early majority of pragmatists. They will adopt Ethereum not because it is novel, but because it solves concrete operational problems—treasury management, governance, compliance, funding—cheaper, faster, or more transparently than the status quo.
For this early-majority segment, the main value propositions are:
Cost-efficiency: Using Ethereum as a low-cost back-office for treasury, governance, and record-keeping, instead of bespoke SaaS plus fragmented spreadsheets.
Interoperability: Being “natively integrated” into the global onchain economy – stablecoins, DeFi credit, grants, quadratic funding, onchain marketplaces.
Composability: Being able to plug into other tools (KYC, payroll, insurance, analytics) through shared standards, not custom integrations.
The integration of Ethereum primitives can help bridge this chasm: taking tools that were originally built for individuals and power users (wallets, DeFi protocols, ENS, EAS, tokens) and composing them into opinionated, end-to-end flows that make sense for collective entities. By wrapping these primitives in clear onboarding journeys, shared governance structures (Safe), and verifiable records (EAS), we turn Ethereum from a playground for enthusiasts into a credible operating system for startups and SMEs—the early majority that can carry the ecosystem into the mainstream.
A MicroDAO is our term for a minimum viable DAO: the smallest set of onchain components needed for a startup, SME, or project team to operate in a transparent, programmable, and interoperable way—without falling into “DAO governance theater.”
The minimal MicroDAO uses three core primitives (ENS, Safe, EAS), which can be extended with DeFi integrations and a Company Token as the organization matures and its operational needs grow.
In our work at Zenbit, we intentionally reduced this stack to three Ethereum primitives:
ENS – identity and namespace for the collective and its members.
Safe (multichain) – a shared smart account for treasury and execution, with the same address across multiple networks.
EAS attestations – a standard way to record verifiable claims about roles, milestones, and outcomes.
This minimum stack is enough to give an early-stage team:
A name and addressable identity onchain.
A shared account to hold funds and execute decisions.
A public memory of what has been done, by whom, and when.
For startups and SMEs, this is precisely what is missing in the informal, early stages: clear ownership, transparent money flows, and verifiable history—but implemented through open infrastructure instead of heavy legal and corporate overhead.
In more detail, a MicroDAO combines:
ENS – Identity and namespace
A human-readable primary name for the organization (e.g. mycompany.eth) instead of raw addresses.
A namespace of subdomains (e.g. alice.mycompany.eth, safe.mycompany.eth) to distinguish roles, treasury accounts, and partner organizations.
A discoverable identity that wallets, explorers, and apps can resolve, which is crucial once an SME starts interacting with customers, funders, or other DAOs.
Safe (multichain) – Shared treasury and execution
A multichain Safe that holds the treasury (stablecoins, native tokens, later a company token if needed).
Multi-sig control (e.g. 2-of-3 founders) so that no single person can unilaterally drain funds.
The same Safe address on all supported networks, simplifying mental models and allowing the team to choose the most convenient L2s for operations.
In practice, Safe acts like the joint bank account + board approval system of the MicroDAO.
EAS attestations – Verifiable history
Schemas that define what is being attested (e.g. “DAO formed,” “operational goal defined,” “funding milestone reached”).
Attestations issued by mentors, coordinators, or the DAO itself to record events, contributions, and achievements.
A public, queryable record that can later be reused by funding programs, incubators, or regulators as evidence of activity.
Instead of scattered PDFs, spreadsheets, and private chats, a MicroDAO has a shared ledger of decisions and milestones that is portable across tools and jurisdictions.
For founders of startups and SMEs, this minimal structure offers a way to formalize their organization without losing flexibility, and to gradually move from full informality towards verifiable, auditable operations.
To make this pattern accessible to non-crypto-native teams, Zenbit designed a microDAO incubation program that walks projects through six milestones:
MicroDAO Creation
Integration of a multichain Safe with an ENS name as the minimum viable version of a MicroDAO. The team defines signers, chooses networks, and connects the onchain identity (dao-name.eth) to the shared account.
DAO Presentation
Formal public introduction of the initiative—often through a Mirror article or public presentation—that explains its mission, stakeholders, and why it operates as a MicroDAO. This is usually the first moment where the project appears as a collective onchain actor, not just a personal wallet.
Operational Goal
Definition of a concrete, measurable goal that justifies the MicroDAO’s existence (e.g., “operate a biomuseum,” “launch an MVP,” “run a pilot with 10 customers”) and links day-to-day activities with expected outcomes. This creates an anchor for later attestations.
Treasury Management
Design of a basic financial model using the Safe: who can spend, under what rules, and how income is categorized (donations, grants, sales). DeFi can be added later, but the focus in this phase is transparency and traceability of flows.
Onchain Implementation
Recording of the project’s key actions as EAS attestations and onchain transactions: formation, goals, events, payments, and milestones. The idea is that an external observer can reconstruct what the MicroDAO has actually done, without needing insider access.
Onchain Funding
Use of onchain mechanisms—grants, donations, crowdfunding, or revenue channels—to bring capital into the Safe. At this point, the MicroDAO is not just a structure; it becomes a
This six-phase program is designed to be portable: it can be used for scientific projects like Axolotarium, but also for early-stage startups and SMEs that need a lightweight way to structure ownership, operations, and funding without incorporating a full company from day one.
To make this incubation process transparent and auditable, Zenbit developed Zenbit Badges [GitHub] —an onchain identity dapp that automates EAS attestations from a dedicated account (e.g. badges.zenbit.eth). The dapp maintains a registry of events, mentors, and participants, and issues attestations automatically when conditions are met.
Zenbit Badges:
Exposes different interfaces by role (mentors and participants) and structures learning and tasks as “events” and “quizzes.”
Uses a Solidity contract (EASOnboarding) to record activity and issue attestations on Optimism mainnet.
Defines a catalog of certifications and quiz types, including verifying Safe membership via ENS and validating authorship of Mirror articles.
For the DAO incubation pilot, Zenbit created a series of eight badges that roughly track the evolution of a project from zero to a fully operational MicroDAO: Introduction to Web3, DAO formation, DAO presentation, operational goal, community building, decentralized funding, academic paper, and technical development.
These eight badges map to the six incubation milestones, with some milestones awarding multiple badges to recognize distinct achievements.
From the perspective of startups and SMEs, Zenbit Badges acts as:
A progress tracker that shows how far along the incubation journey each team is.
A reputation layer that future funders, partners, or accelerators can query.
A standardized reporting mechanism that reduces the need for bespoke reporting formats across different programs.
Axolotarium is a specialized center for conservation, reproduction, and scientific research of Mexican axolotls, while Zenbit focuses on onchain technologies and decentralized governance. Their collaboration began in mid-2024 as part of the pilot incubation program, with the goal of transforming Axolotarium into a MicroDAO capable of coordinating conservation work, research, and funding through Ethereum. For a detailed overview of this collaboration, see our full report.
In practice, Axolotarium:
Published its first Mirror article, “Axolotarium: Axolotls, science and blockchain”, as a DAO presentation milestone, explaining its mission and alliances.
Completed the first milestones of the incubation program and received Zenbit Badges for:
Introduction to Web3 tools,
Formal creation of its MicroDAO (Safe + ENS), and
Public presentation via Mirror.
Adopted a multichain Safe linked to axolotarium.eth as its shared treasury, experimenting with onchain funding flows for the biomuseum and research activities.
Through this process, Axolotarium strengthened its organizational structure, digital literacy, and sustainability model, moving from an informal research group to a project with a verifiable onchain identity, transparent treasury, and a roadmap for decentralized funding.
For the broader narrative of this article, Axolotarium shows that MicroDAOs are not limited to crypto-native startups: they can structure real-world institutions—labs, conservation centers, small NGOs—with the same tooling that a tech startup would use.
As the pilot with Axolotarium progressed, several limitations of the initial Safe-centered design became evident:
The main ENS domain axolotarium.eth pointed directly to a multichain Safe.
Administrative actions on some dapps (for example, publishing on Mirror) required an EOA (externally owned account), so an additional subdomain (info.axolotarium.eth) was mapped to a personal admin wallet.
Other members had no subdomains of their own, which made it hard to clearly distinguish personal vs. institutional actions.
Changes in Safe signers across multiple chains could create mismatches or require repeated coordination.
Concentrating administrative power and private keys in a single account created security and governance risks.
These issues were not unique to Axolotarium—they mirror what many startups and SMEs face when they try to “just use a multisig” without thinking about identity and role separation.
AxoloDAO was designed as an iteration on this experience, shifting from a Safe-centered to an ENS-centered approach:
The main domain axolodao.eth is used as a shared admin identity whose keys and access policies are explicitly governed by the collective.
A dedicated subdomain like safe.axolodao.eth points to the multichain Safe, making the treasury a clearly labeled component rather than the only identity.
Key institutional members receive their own subdomains (ndali.axolodao.eth, xolotlcalli.axolodao.eth, zenbit.axolodao.eth, etc.), which can be tied to their wallets or Safes for role-based operations.
EAS attestations encode data standards, research activities, and conservation metrics, turning AxoloDAO into a digital public infrastructure layer rather than a single project.
Learn more about AxoloDAO's mission to revolutionize Ambystoma conservation in Mexico
Beyond the ENS/Safe re-architecture, AxoloDAO tackles the deeper problem discovered during the Axolotarium pilot: information asymmetry in biodiversity conservation. It uses onchain infrastructure to:
Standardize data capture and reporting across labs and field projects.
Provide verifiable, auditable records of genetics, reproduction, and monitoring activities.
Create open repositories and interoperable governance mechanisms that connect local initiatives with national-level strategies.
In other words, AxoloDAO turns a set of isolated efforts into a coordinated information and decision system, with MicroDAOs as its basic unit.
The Axolotarium and AxoloDAO pilots may seem far from the world of SaaS startups or local SMEs—but the underlying pattern is the same:
A small group with a mission (conservation, product development, local services).
Operating in a context of informality, fragmented records, and funding uncertainty.
Needing a way to formalize just enough to access resources, prove impact, and coordinate multiple stakeholders.
The MicroDAO pattern—ENS + multichain Safe + EAS, guided by the six-phase incubation model and tracked with Zenbit Badges—offers exactly that: a lightweight but robust operating system for early-stage organizations.
For startups and SMEs, this means they can:
Get an onchain identity and shared treasury in days, not months.
Build a verifiable track record of milestones, customers, and financial discipline from the beginning.
Plug into funding mechanisms, incubators, and ecosystems that recognize MicroDAO attestations as credible evidence.
In practice, using MicroDAOs represents a 95-99% reduction in both cost and time compared to traditional incorporation and bank account setup, especially in regions where legal and financial infrastructure is slow or exclusionary. What might take 3-6 months and $2,000-$10,000 USD through traditional channels can be accomplished in 2-3 days for less than $100 USD in transaction fees
In the next section we will explore how to take this pattern one step further by integrating these tools into a single UX, so that founders don’t need to be protocol experts to start operating as MicroDAOs.
The previous section described MicroDAOs as a minimum viable DAO for startups and SMEs: ENS for identity, a multichain Safe for shared treasury, and EAS for verifiable history. For many teams, this is already a huge leap from full informality. But to truly serve startups and SMEs as the early majority of Ethereum’s user base, we also need to make it easy to add:
DeFi features for savings and credit (yield protocols and lending/borrowing).
A company token that acts as a stakeholder instrument and internal economy mechanism (equity-like shares, contributor rewards, revenue sharing).
Startupchain is our attempt to bundle all of this into a single, coherent product: a decentralized application that offers Onchain Company Services (OCS) for establishing and managing startups and small businesses.
Instead of expecting founders to manually stitch together ENS, Safe, DeFi, EAS, and token contracts across multiple dapps, Startupchain aims to provide one entry point for creating and operating an onchain company.
Today, setting up a MicroDAO—or any onchain company—still looks like a scavenger hunt:
Register an ENS name in one interface.
Create a multichain Safe in another.
Manually wire funds to DeFi protocols to earn yield or access credit.
Use a separate UI to define EAS schemas and issue attestations.
Deploy a company token through yet another tool or custom contract.
Keep track of all of this in private docs and spreadsheets.
For the innovators and early adopters described in Section 1c, this is acceptable friction. For the pragmatic early-majority founders running startups and SMEs—already juggling payroll, regulation, and product development—it is simply too much.
Startupchain’s core goal is to compress this journey into a guided, opinionated flow that reflects the MicroDAO pattern:
Identity: choose and register the company’s ENS domain and subdomains.
Treasury: create and configure the multichain Safe as a shared account.
History: set up EAS schemas and issue the first attestations (formation, founders, initial deposits).
Financial rails: plug the treasury into curated DeFi options for savings (yield) and credit (lending/borrowing).
Internal economy: optionally bootstrap a company token representing stakeholder claims and internal incentives.
From a startup/SME perspective, this turns Ethereum from a collection of protocols into a Service: “set up my onchain company and help me run it safely.”
The first public step toward this vision was the Startupchain prototype at ETHGlobal New York 2025. The team focused on the very first action any onchain company must take: securing a unique ENS domain for its identity.
In the standard ENS flow, founders must navigate multiple screens and concepts (label selection, duration, commitment, reveal, resolver, primary name). The prototype:
Compressed the ENS registration process from five steps into just two,
Wrapped it in a startup-friendly flow (“choose your company name” → “confirm registration”), and
Integrated Privy to allow sign-in with email or existing wallets, making the experience approachable for non-crypto-native founders.
Despite only covering this first step, the prototype demonstrated that small UX improvements at the right layer can dramatically lower the barrier for startups and SMEs to enter Ethereum. The project received 3rd place in the “Best Use of ENS” prize track, validating that this direction aligns with ENS’s own goals of accessibility and adoption.
After ETH New York, we expanded the concept into a full Product Requirements Document (PRD). The PRD defines Startupchain as:
“A decentralized application (dApp) providing Onchain Company Services (OCS) for establishing and managing startups and small businesses.”
At a high level, the MVP integrates five Ethereum building blocks into one service:
ENS – human-readable company names and subdomains for founders and members.
Company accounts – EOA onboarding plus multichain Safes for treasury and governance.
DeFi management – basic transfers, yield-generating savings, and collateralized credit via lending/borrowing protocols (e.g. Aave, Morpho, Moonwell).
EAS attestations – verifiable records of company events (formation, milestones, funding, hires).
Company tokenization – ERC-20 shares with customizable tokenomics, staged for post-MVP / Beta.
In narrative terms, Startupchain is the natural extension of the MicroDAO pattern:
The minimum viable DAO (ENS + Safe + EAS) is the baseline every company gets.
DeFi features turn the Safe treasury into a functional savings and credit account, not just a static wallet.
The company token provides a stakeholder instrument and mechanism for an internal economy—letting founders, employees, contributors, and early supporters share upside in a transparent, programmable way.
The PRD also frames Startupchain explicitly around the needs of startups, small businesses, and organizing entities like accelerators or clusters, emphasizing:
Lower legal and administrative overhead (95-99% cost and time reduction vs traditional incorporation),
Transparent multi-signer control of funds,
Easier access to alternative funding, and
Standardized, verifiable reporting via attestations and dashboards.
In short, where the MicroDAO pattern defines what an onchain company is, Startupchain defines how founders and SMEs will actually use it in practice.
Startupchain is intentionally framed as a work in progress rather than a finished product. The roadmap described in the PRD situates the project in two phases:
An MVP, targeting:Y
ENS domain + subdomain registration from a single dashboard,
Multichain Safe creation and basic governance rails,
DeFi “savings and credit” flows for the company treasury, and
Integrated EAS attestations for company history.
A Beta phase that layers on:
Company token bootstrapping with configurable tokenomics,
Deeper Superchain integration, and
More advanced governance and reporting features.
Our working goal is to deliver the Startupchain MVP by the end of 2025, aligning its launch with the maturation of the MicroDAO incubation program and the experiences gathered from pilots such as Axolotarium and AxoloDAO.
For founders and SME operators, the promise is simple:
“Give us your company name, your founding team, and your initial capital. We’ll give you an onchain company—identity, treasury, savings, credit, internal economy, and verifiable history—in a single, understandable flow.”
By building on the MicroDAO foundations and extending them with DeFi and company tokens, Startupchain aims to bridge the remaining gap between experimental onchain projects and everyday businesses, helping Ethereum truly cross the chasm into the world of startups and SMEs.
We started this article talking about onboarding "the next billion" to Ethereum—a goal that feels abstract and distant. But the path is simpler than it seems: don't onboard individuals one by one. Onboard the organizations they already work with.
Every startup that comes onchain brings its founders, team, customers, and partners. Every SME that adopts transparent treasury management becomes a proof point for ten others in its community. This is the multiplier effect we need.
MicroDAOs provide the architectural pattern; Startupchain provides the product. And if we're right—if we can truly compress months of incorporation into days, and thousands of dollars into tens—then crossing the chasm isn't a distant dream. It's the next 12 months.
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zenbit.ethHow to onboard the next million startups and SME's into Ethereum
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When we talk about “onboarding the next billion into Ethereum,” we usually picture individual users getting wallets and sending their first transactions.
This individual-focused approach has driven most ecosystem development, abstracting Ethereum's complexity into browser and mobile wallets. While this approach serves individual users well, it overlooks a critical opportunity: entities or organizations that coordinate multiple people toward collective goals.
This creates an opportunity. Tools designed for collective action represents a highly leveraged entry point into the ecosystem: the millions of startups and small & medium enterprises (SMEs) that already exist, employ people, and move real economic value every day.
If we can make Ethereum a credible, low-friction environment for these organizations, we can speed up the onboarding of both collective and individual users at the same time. Every startup or SME that comes onchain brings its founders, teams, customers, and partners with it. That is the motivation behind this article and the work we have been doing as part of the Devconnect Scholars Program and at Zenbit.
In this article, we explore:
The context of startups and SMEs and why they are a natural “early majority” segment for Ethereum.
MicroDAOs as a minimum viable DAO pattern that combines five Ethereum primitives: ENS, Safe, DeFi, EAS, and a Company Token, with real-world examples like Axolotarium and AxoloDAO.
Startupchain, an integrated product that reduces UX friction by orchestrating all these tools in a single flow, starting from the prototype built at ETH New York and continued through the Startupchain PRD.
Globally, startups and SMEs represent the majority of firms as well as a large share of employment and GDP. Even in informality, they are the main vehicle to leverage economic opportunities for founders and entrepreneurs. Around 99% of companies worldwide are startups or SMEs, adding up to more than 391 million businesses. Over half are in Asia (51%), followed by Africa (23%), Europe (10%), North America (10%), South America (5%), and Oceania (1%). This distribution shows not only how massive the SME segment is, but also how geographically diverse it is. Any strategy to bring the real economy onchain must speak to this 99% and work across very different regions, levels of infrastructure, and regulatory realities.
Each of these types of organization offers different features that suit diverse contexts worldwide. Those able to leverage new technologies or business models may choose to found startups focused on rapid growth and long-term scalability, accepting higher risk as they build at the knowledge frontier. Small businesses, on the other hand, rely on proven models that deliver stable operations and more predictable profitability.
While there are notable differences between startups and small businesses, such as their goals, risk tolerance and time horizons, both profiles can benefit from onchain tools to:
Bootstrap trust and coordination among co-founders.
Manage shared treasuries and cashflow transparently.
Formalize relationships with collaborators, investors, and community.
Record IP, contributions, and milestones in a verifiable way.
This makes them ideal candidates for onchain coordination, especially in regions where traditional financial and legal infrastructure is slow, opaque, or exclusionary.
Because startups and SMEs already move significant economic value, onboarding them is not about speculation; it’s about the backbone of employment and production in every region of the world. Their impact on jobs is overwhelming: in Africa, startups and SMEs generate around 84% of employment, in South America and Europe about 70%, in Oceania 70%, in Asia 64%, and in North America 59%. In other words, most people who work in the formal economy do so in organizations that look much more like a small firm or startup than a multinational corporation.
At the same time, a substantial share of these startups and SMEs operate in the informal economy, which limits their access to credit, digital tools, and long-term planning. Approximately 38% of African startups and SMEs, 35% of those in South America, and 22% in Asia are informal, compared with 16% in North America, 15% in Europe, and 11% in Oceania. This means that some of the regions where startups and SMEs create the most jobs are also those where they are least integrated into formal financial and legal systems.
In many countries, especially in the Global South, this informality shows up as:
No clear legal entity or incorporation.
No structured cap table, vesting, or ownership records.
No formal agreements with collaborators.
Cash-based accounting with limited or no audit trail.
Because of this dual reality—central to employment but often structurally excluded—onboarding startups and SMEs to Ethereum is not just an efficiency upgrade. It is a way to:
Channel real-world revenue (payments, invoices, subscriptions) through open, programmable infrastructure.
Support real employment (payroll, contractor payments) with transparent treasuries and auditable flows.
Protect and monetize real assets and IP (licenses, patents, content, scientific data) with verifiable records.
Enable real community outcomes (education, conservation, local development) by making funding and governance legible and accountable.
If Ethereum wants to become a credible global settlement layer, it must support these everyday, “boring” business operations — especially in regions where the combination of high startup/SME employment and high informality reveals how fragile current coordination and finance rails really are.
Technology adoption rarely happens all at once. It follows a curve where different segments of users come in at different moments, each with their own needs and expectations. At the left side of the curve we find innovators (tech enthusiasts, ~2.5%), people who adopt new tools simply because they are new and are willing to tolerate bugs, rough edges, and missing features. Next come the early adopters (visionaries, ~13.5%), who see strategic advantage in being first and are willing to experiment as long as the upside is big enough.
These two groups form the early market. Most of Ethereum’s first decade has been dominated by them: protocol researchers, DeFi degens, NFT collectors, DAO-native teams — people who are happy to manage seed phrases, sign raw transactions, and compose protocols like Lego bricks.
Between this early market and the rest of society lies what Geoffrey Moore calls “the chasm”: a structural gap between what early adopters are willing to accept and what the mainstream market demands (Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling High-Tech Products to Mainstream Customers, 1991). On the other side of the chasm sit the early majority (pragmatists, ~34%) and the late majority (conservatives, ~34%), followed by laggards (skeptics, ~16%). Pragmatists don’t care that a technology is new; they care that it works reliably, fits into their existing workflows, and clearly improves cost, speed, or risk. Conservatives and skeptics are even more demanding: they expect mature products, standards, and support.
In general, if a technology doesn’t evolve to meet the needs of the next segment, it fails to cross the chasm and remains a niche tool for enthusiasts. But if it adapts—by improving UX, hiding complexity, and solving specific, visible problems—it can bridge this gap and access a much broader market.
In the context of Ethereum, this means recognizing that:
DeFi degens, NFT collectors, and protocol-native teams map to the innovators and early adopters on the left side of the curve. They are comfortable juggling multiple wallets, interfaces, and protocols to compose their own solutions.
Startups and SMEs correspond to the early majority of pragmatists. They will adopt Ethereum not because it is novel, but because it solves concrete operational problems—treasury management, governance, compliance, funding—cheaper, faster, or more transparently than the status quo.
For this early-majority segment, the main value propositions are:
Cost-efficiency: Using Ethereum as a low-cost back-office for treasury, governance, and record-keeping, instead of bespoke SaaS plus fragmented spreadsheets.
Interoperability: Being “natively integrated” into the global onchain economy – stablecoins, DeFi credit, grants, quadratic funding, onchain marketplaces.
Composability: Being able to plug into other tools (KYC, payroll, insurance, analytics) through shared standards, not custom integrations.
The integration of Ethereum primitives can help bridge this chasm: taking tools that were originally built for individuals and power users (wallets, DeFi protocols, ENS, EAS, tokens) and composing them into opinionated, end-to-end flows that make sense for collective entities. By wrapping these primitives in clear onboarding journeys, shared governance structures (Safe), and verifiable records (EAS), we turn Ethereum from a playground for enthusiasts into a credible operating system for startups and SMEs—the early majority that can carry the ecosystem into the mainstream.
A MicroDAO is our term for a minimum viable DAO: the smallest set of onchain components needed for a startup, SME, or project team to operate in a transparent, programmable, and interoperable way—without falling into “DAO governance theater.”
The minimal MicroDAO uses three core primitives (ENS, Safe, EAS), which can be extended with DeFi integrations and a Company Token as the organization matures and its operational needs grow.
In our work at Zenbit, we intentionally reduced this stack to three Ethereum primitives:
ENS – identity and namespace for the collective and its members.
Safe (multichain) – a shared smart account for treasury and execution, with the same address across multiple networks.
EAS attestations – a standard way to record verifiable claims about roles, milestones, and outcomes.
This minimum stack is enough to give an early-stage team:
A name and addressable identity onchain.
A shared account to hold funds and execute decisions.
A public memory of what has been done, by whom, and when.
For startups and SMEs, this is precisely what is missing in the informal, early stages: clear ownership, transparent money flows, and verifiable history—but implemented through open infrastructure instead of heavy legal and corporate overhead.
In more detail, a MicroDAO combines:
ENS – Identity and namespace
A human-readable primary name for the organization (e.g. mycompany.eth) instead of raw addresses.
A namespace of subdomains (e.g. alice.mycompany.eth, safe.mycompany.eth) to distinguish roles, treasury accounts, and partner organizations.
A discoverable identity that wallets, explorers, and apps can resolve, which is crucial once an SME starts interacting with customers, funders, or other DAOs.
Safe (multichain) – Shared treasury and execution
A multichain Safe that holds the treasury (stablecoins, native tokens, later a company token if needed).
Multi-sig control (e.g. 2-of-3 founders) so that no single person can unilaterally drain funds.
The same Safe address on all supported networks, simplifying mental models and allowing the team to choose the most convenient L2s for operations.
In practice, Safe acts like the joint bank account + board approval system of the MicroDAO.
EAS attestations – Verifiable history
Schemas that define what is being attested (e.g. “DAO formed,” “operational goal defined,” “funding milestone reached”).
Attestations issued by mentors, coordinators, or the DAO itself to record events, contributions, and achievements.
A public, queryable record that can later be reused by funding programs, incubators, or regulators as evidence of activity.
Instead of scattered PDFs, spreadsheets, and private chats, a MicroDAO has a shared ledger of decisions and milestones that is portable across tools and jurisdictions.
For founders of startups and SMEs, this minimal structure offers a way to formalize their organization without losing flexibility, and to gradually move from full informality towards verifiable, auditable operations.
To make this pattern accessible to non-crypto-native teams, Zenbit designed a microDAO incubation program that walks projects through six milestones:
MicroDAO Creation
Integration of a multichain Safe with an ENS name as the minimum viable version of a MicroDAO. The team defines signers, chooses networks, and connects the onchain identity (dao-name.eth) to the shared account.
DAO Presentation
Formal public introduction of the initiative—often through a Mirror article or public presentation—that explains its mission, stakeholders, and why it operates as a MicroDAO. This is usually the first moment where the project appears as a collective onchain actor, not just a personal wallet.
Operational Goal
Definition of a concrete, measurable goal that justifies the MicroDAO’s existence (e.g., “operate a biomuseum,” “launch an MVP,” “run a pilot with 10 customers”) and links day-to-day activities with expected outcomes. This creates an anchor for later attestations.
Treasury Management
Design of a basic financial model using the Safe: who can spend, under what rules, and how income is categorized (donations, grants, sales). DeFi can be added later, but the focus in this phase is transparency and traceability of flows.
Onchain Implementation
Recording of the project’s key actions as EAS attestations and onchain transactions: formation, goals, events, payments, and milestones. The idea is that an external observer can reconstruct what the MicroDAO has actually done, without needing insider access.
Onchain Funding
Use of onchain mechanisms—grants, donations, crowdfunding, or revenue channels—to bring capital into the Safe. At this point, the MicroDAO is not just a structure; it becomes a funding-ready vehicle with verifiable history and governance.
This six-phase program is designed to be portable: it can be used for scientific projects like Axolotarium, but also for early-stage startups and SMEs that need a lightweight way to structure ownership, operations, and funding without incorporating a full company from day one.
To make this incubation process transparent and auditable, Zenbit developed Zenbit Badges [GitHub] —an onchain identity dapp that automates EAS attestations from a dedicated account (e.g. badges.zenbit.eth). The dapp maintains a registry of events, mentors, and participants, and issues attestations automatically when conditions are met.
Zenbit Badges:
Exposes different interfaces by role (mentors and participants) and structures learning and tasks as “events” and “quizzes.”
Uses a Solidity contract (EASOnboarding) to record activity and issue attestations on Optimism mainnet.
Defines a catalog of certifications and quiz types, including verifying Safe membership via ENS and validating authorship of Mirror articles.
For the DAO incubation pilot, Zenbit created a series of eight badges that roughly track the evolution of a project from zero to a fully operational MicroDAO: Introduction to Web3, DAO formation, DAO presentation, operational goal, community building, decentralized funding, academic paper, and technical development.
These eight badges map to the six incubation milestones, with some milestones awarding multiple badges to recognize distinct achievements.
From the perspective of startups and SMEs, Zenbit Badges acts as:
A progress tracker that shows how far along the incubation journey each team is.
A reputation layer that future funders, partners, or accelerators can query.
A standardized reporting mechanism that reduces the need for bespoke reporting formats across different programs.
Axolotarium is a specialized center for conservation, reproduction, and scientific research of Mexican axolotls, while Zenbit focuses on onchain technologies and decentralized governance. Their collaboration began in mid-2024 as part of the pilot incubation program, with the goal of transforming Axolotarium into a MicroDAO capable of coordinating conservation work, research, and funding through Ethereum. For a detailed overview of this collaboration, see our full report.
In practice, Axolotarium:
Published its first Mirror article, “Axolotarium: Axolotls, science and blockchain”, as a DAO presentation milestone, explaining its mission and alliances.
Completed the first milestones of the incubation program and received Zenbit Badges for:
Introduction to Web3 tools,
Formal creation of its MicroDAO (Safe + ENS), and
Public presentation via Mirror.
Adopted a multichain Safe linked to axolotarium.eth as its shared treasury, experimenting with onchain funding flows for the biomuseum and research activities.
Through this process, Axolotarium strengthened its organizational structure, digital literacy, and sustainability model, moving from an informal research group to a project with a verifiable onchain identity, transparent treasury, and a roadmap for decentralized funding.
For the broader narrative of this article, Axolotarium shows that MicroDAOs are not limited to crypto-native startups: they can structure real-world institutions—labs, conservation centers, small NGOs—with the same tooling that a tech startup would use.
As the pilot with Axolotarium progressed, several limitations of the initial Safe-centered design became evident:
The main ENS domain axolotarium.eth pointed directly to a multichain Safe.
Administrative actions on some dapps (for example, publishing on Mirror) required an EOA (externally owned account), so an additional subdomain (info.axolotarium.eth) was mapped to a personal admin wallet.
Other members had no subdomains of their own, which made it hard to clearly distinguish personal vs. institutional actions.
Changes in Safe signers across multiple chains could create mismatches or require repeated coordination.
Concentrating administrative power and private keys in a single account created security and governance risks.
These issues were not unique to Axolotarium—they mirror what many startups and SMEs face when they try to “just use a multisig” without thinking about identity and role separation.
AxoloDAO was designed as an iteration on this experience, shifting from a Safe-centered to an ENS-centered approach:
The main domain axolodao.eth is used as a shared admin identity whose keys and access policies are explicitly governed by the collective.
A dedicated subdomain like safe.axolodao.eth points to the multichain Safe, making the treasury a clearly labeled component rather than the only identity.
Key institutional members receive their own subdomains (ndali.axolodao.eth, xolotlcalli.axolodao.eth, zenbit.axolodao.eth, etc.), which can be tied to their wallets or Safes for role-based operations.
EAS attestations encode data standards, research activities, and conservation metrics, turning AxoloDAO into a digital public infrastructure layer rather than a single project.
Learn more about AxoloDAO's mission to revolutionize Ambystoma conservation in Mexico
Beyond the ENS/Safe re-architecture, AxoloDAO tackles the deeper problem discovered during the Axolotarium pilot: information asymmetry in biodiversity conservation. It uses onchain infrastructure to:
Standardize data capture and reporting across labs and field projects.
Provide verifiable, auditable records of genetics, reproduction, and monitoring activities.
Create open repositories and interoperable governance mechanisms that connect local initiatives with national-level strategies.
In other words, AxoloDAO turns a set of isolated efforts into a coordinated information and decision system, with MicroDAOs as its basic unit.
The Axolotarium and AxoloDAO pilots may seem far from the world of SaaS startups or local SMEs—but the underlying pattern is the same:
A small group with a mission (conservation, product development, local services).
Operating in a context of informality, fragmented records, and funding uncertainty.
Needing a way to formalize just enough to access resources, prove impact, and coordinate multiple stakeholders.
The MicroDAO pattern—ENS + multichain Safe + EAS, guided by the six-phase incubation model and tracked with Zenbit Badges—offers exactly that: a lightweight but robust operating system for early-stage organizations.
For startups and SMEs, this means they can:
Get an onchain identity and shared treasury in days, not months.
Build a verifiable track record of milestones, customers, and financial discipline from the beginning.
Plug into funding mechanisms, incubators, and ecosystems that recognize MicroDAO attestations as credible evidence.
In practice, using MicroDAOs represents a 95-99% reduction in both cost and time compared to traditional incorporation and bank account setup, especially in regions where legal and financial infrastructure is slow or exclusionary. What might take 3-6 months and $2,000-$10,000 USD through traditional channels can be accomplished in 2-3 days for less than $100 USD in transaction fees
In the next section we will explore how to take this pattern one step further by integrating these tools into a single UX, so that founders don’t need to be protocol experts to start operating as MicroDAOs.
The previous section described MicroDAOs as a minimum viable DAO for startups and SMEs: ENS for identity, a multichain Safe for shared treasury, and EAS for verifiable history. For many teams, this is already a huge leap from full informality. But to truly serve startups and SMEs as the early majority of Ethereum’s user base, we also need to make it easy to add:
DeFi features for savings and credit (yield protocols and lending/borrowing).
A company token that acts as a stakeholder instrument and internal economy mechanism (equity-like shares, contributor rewards, revenue sharing).
Startupchain is our attempt to bundle all of this into a single, coherent product: a decentralized application that offers Onchain Company Services (OCS) for establishing and managing startups and small businesses.
Instead of expecting founders to manually stitch together ENS, Safe, DeFi, EAS, and token contracts across multiple dapps, Startupchain aims to provide one entry point for creating and operating an onchain company.
Today, setting up a MicroDAO—or any onchain company—still looks like a scavenger hunt:
Register an ENS name in one interface.
Create a multichain Safe in another.
Manually wire funds to DeFi protocols to earn yield or access credit.
Use a separate UI to define EAS schemas and issue attestations.
Deploy a company token through yet another tool or custom contract.
Keep track of all of this in private docs and spreadsheets.
For the innovators and early adopters described in Section 1c, this is acceptable friction. For the pragmatic early-majority founders running startups and SMEs—already juggling payroll, regulation, and product development—it is simply too much.
Startupchain’s core goal is to compress this journey into a guided, opinionated flow that reflects the MicroDAO pattern:
Identity: choose and register the company’s ENS domain and subdomains.
Treasury: create and configure the multichain Safe as a shared account.
History: set up EAS schemas and issue the first attestations (formation, founders, initial deposits).
Financial rails: plug the treasury into curated DeFi options for savings (yield) and credit (lending/borrowing).
Internal economy: optionally bootstrap a company token representing stakeholder claims and internal incentives.
From a startup/SME perspective, this turns Ethereum from a collection of protocols into a Service: “set up my onchain company and help me run it safely.”
The first public step toward this vision was the Startupchain prototype at ETHGlobal New York 2025. The team focused on the very first action any onchain company must take: securing a unique ENS domain for its identity.
In the standard ENS flow, founders must navigate multiple screens and concepts (label selection, duration, commitment, reveal, resolver, primary name). The prototype:
Compressed the ENS registration process from five steps into just two,
Wrapped it in a startup-friendly flow (“choose your company name” → “confirm registration”), and
Integrated Privy to allow sign-in with email or existing wallets, making the experience approachable for non-crypto-native founders.
Despite only covering this first step, the prototype demonstrated that small UX improvements at the right layer can dramatically lower the barrier for startups and SMEs to enter Ethereum. The project received 3rd place in the “Best Use of ENS” prize track, validating that this direction aligns with ENS’s own goals of accessibility and adoption.
After ETH New York, we expanded the concept into a full Product Requirements Document (PRD). The PRD defines Startupchain as:
“A decentralized application (dApp) providing Onchain Company Services (OCS) for establishing and managing startups and small businesses.”
At a high level, the MVP integrates five Ethereum building blocks into one service:
ENS – human-readable company names and subdomains for founders and members.
Company accounts – EOA onboarding plus multichain Safes for treasury and governance.
DeFi management – basic transfers, yield-generating savings, and collateralized credit via lending/borrowing protocols (e.g. Aave, Morpho, Moonwell).
EAS attestations – verifiable records of company events (formation, milestones, funding, hires).
Company tokenization – ERC-20 shares with customizable tokenomics, staged for post-MVP / Beta.
In narrative terms, Startupchain is the natural extension of the MicroDAO pattern:
The minimum viable DAO (ENS + Safe + EAS) is the baseline every company gets.
DeFi features turn the Safe treasury into a functional savings and credit account, not just a static wallet.
The company token provides a stakeholder instrument and mechanism for an internal economy—letting founders, employees, contributors, and early supporters share upside in a transparent, programmable way.
The PRD also frames Startupchain explicitly around the needs of startups, small businesses, and organizing entities like accelerators or clusters, emphasizing:
Lower legal and administrative overhead (95-99% cost and time reduction vs traditional incorporation),
Transparent multi-signer control of funds,
Easier access to alternative funding, and
Standardized, verifiable reporting via attestations and dashboards.
In short, where the MicroDAO pattern defines what an onchain company is, Startupchain defines how founders and SMEs will actually use it in practice.
Startupchain is intentionally framed as a work in progress rather than a finished product. The roadmap described in the PRD situates the project in two phases:
An MVP, targeting:Y
ENS domain + subdomain registration from a single dashboard,
Multichain Safe creation and basic governance rails,
DeFi “savings and credit” flows for the company treasury, and
Integrated EAS attestations for company history.
A Beta phase that layers on:
Company token bootstrapping with configurable tokenomics,
Deeper Superchain integration, and
More advanced governance and reporting features.
Our working goal is to deliver the Startupchain MVP by the end of 2025, aligning its launch with the maturation of the MicroDAO incubation program and the experiences gathered from pilots such as Axolotarium and AxoloDAO.
For founders and SME operators, the promise is simple:
“Give us your company name, your founding team, and your initial capital. We’ll give you an onchain company—identity, treasury, savings, credit, internal economy, and verifiable history—in a single, understandable flow.”
By building on the MicroDAO foundations and extending them with DeFi and company tokens, Startupchain aims to bridge the remaining gap between experimental onchain projects and everyday businesses, helping Ethereum truly cross the chasm into the world of startups and SMEs.
We started this article talking about onboarding "the next billion" to Ethereum—a goal that feels abstract and distant. But the path is simpler than it seems: don't onboard individuals one by one. Onboard the organizations they already work with.
Every startup that comes onchain brings its founders, team, customers, and partners. Every SME that adopts transparent treasury management becomes a proof point for ten others in its community. This is the multiplier effect we need.
MicroDAOs provide the architectural pattern; Startupchain provides the product. And if we're right—if we can truly compress months of incorporation into days, and thousands of dollars into tens—then crossing the chasm isn't a distant dream. It's the next 12 months.
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From the original AxoloDAO article The genus Ambystoma comprises approximately 32 species of salamanders distributed exclusively across North America. Mexico harbors 17 of these species, with 16 of them being endemic to the national territory (SEMARNAT, 2018; Parra-Olea et al., 2014). Despite possessing more than 50% of the global diversity of these neotenic amphibians and being home to the Mexican axolotl (Ambystoma mexicanum)—a species that has demonstrated therapeutic potential in regenera...
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