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It’s been in the making for some time, and finally – to celebrate this new year of Web3 – we are ready to introduce Āut Labs: a suite of DAO-native Tools to expand decentralized communities.
Now, 2023 is a particular year.
It comes after the golden era of DeFi (20-21), the Regen + DAO year of 2022, and in parallel with the ZK + AI rages of Q1 ’23. What does this leave us with? Have all these movements quickly risen and prematurely died? Are they all engaged in a blood fight with each other – where in the end, only one of them will emerge victorious, holding the heads of its opponents? Most certainly not.
Each and every Web3 trend is non-competitive by design. Therefore, the more development arises in each of these trends, the more the ecosystem enriches and grows. The power of composability, the holy grail of the technology we all love and hate from time to time.
Nonetheless, the more innovation we bring to the table, the more complexity we add – therefore, it gets harder and harder to progressively and mindfully incorporate and combine all these different aspects within a compounded whole. Especially when the offer is so varied and the approaches differ so widely from one another.
At the end of the day, whatever we call it, and however we see it – this is one of the most significant risks of Coordination Failure we incur as a group. And at one of the largest possible scales ever.
That’s why we consider 2023 the Year of Coordination (#YoC) – and, on the same vibe, this is an intro to Āut Labs’ Beta: the Coordination Renaissance— the first of its kind.
Before we start, if you missed SkillWallet, or you want to dive deeper into it: in a poignant overturn, here’s an article we shared recently, called Goodbye SkillWallet.
The very last article at SkillWallet’s name 🥲
Back to us: SkillWallet was born as “a wallet for your skills,” and SkillWallet Genesis became the first non-transferable NFT ID in existence. The first of what we now know as SBT, or “Soul-bound Token.”
It came as a claimable, self-sovereign ID, binding individual members together with the DAOs they are part of — and it was designed to power a free, fairer, and more open world for individuals and collectives.
This is a historic achievement — and with two (2.5*) years of work, five (5) products, and a suite of Contracts: SkillWallet is all but dead.
Rather, SkillWallet - the Identity & Reputation layer of Web3 - has evolved into a suite of DAO-native tools to push forward the limits of human Coordination.
If, on one side, SkillWallet was born out of the premise that it is the actor – the contributor, the participant – the atomic element of Coordination and decentralized systems as a whole – on the other, Āut is its logical continuation.
As rebranding took us almost a year, here are a few highlights of this soul searching process:
From Greek, āut means “Self” As in Self-Sovereign, or Self-governance.
As well as “Autonomous” → from Greek avtonomos → enforcing its own rules.
Āut is one’s own self. In open break with the status quo.
It also sounds like Out, and we like that.
i.e.: I got in, by getting [o/ā]ut.
Autonomy - within and beyond the digital borders of a community.
Listening to our Community, and in need to expand and complement what we started more than two years ago – Āut has evolved to be the V2 of SkillWallet.
In that sense, Āut is a workshop of innovation – aiming to collectively build the tools needed for a fully autonomous Coordination Stack for Web3 Governance and the decentralized world. Basically, the infrastructure and components that allow self-sovereignty to a community, a group of people, a digital country, or a digital nation. For them to be composable, human-shaped, and safe.
In a nutshell: Āut is a suite of DAO-native Membership & Governance Tools to expand Autonomy & Coordination in decentralized communities – and power the next generation of human Coordination.
If DAOs are to be the future of human Coordination (or at least try to be), we need some common ground to discuss them.
So, here’s a TL;DR of what DAOs are vs. what they can be today:
DAOs are groups of people first.
For this group of people to be a DAO, the Community needs to be powered by (and rely on) smart contracts that allow decentralized governance and track membership, access, and benefits+duties.
The atomic unit of DAOs is their Members, combined with their free interaction.
Currently, DAOs are a bit more than “Smart Treasuries” – where members can “pool together” their funds, and, in exchange for their capital, they receive equivalent benefits in either reputation, voting power, or shares. DAOs can be more than that.
DAOs can be functional groups of humans, coordinating with each other to “do things” – namely: tasks, projects, events, and any form of collaboration with each other. Potentially up to entire constitutions and Network States.
Based on the above, it sounds like everything is a DAO. So, what is a DAO, concretely?
It comes out that after almost three years since we started, there is still no standard definition of what a DAO is - and pretty much everybody has their own. DAOs are still like “love,” “art,” or “Laura Palmer” - nobody knows exactly who/what they are, or who killed them.
Attempting a 360° / 3D definition of idea vs. action in a DAO, we may quote what our Founder said last July @ETHBarcelona.
DAOs – decentralized autonomous organizations – are a completely different way to collaborate, communicate and work together. It’s this beautiful utopia where strangers on the Internet can get in cahoots with each other to launch a techno party in the forest, create a new financial system, or subvert the status quo.
Unfortunately, though, we are still far from realizing this vision – and DAOs have to face very old problems, such as centralization itself, where founders or a limited group of people are in charge of implementing collective decisions. This brings us back to the old pyramid of trust: multi-layered, hierarchical, and oligarchic by design. Similar to the state-machine - that DAOs have otherwise the potential to subvert.
So here you go: it’s a coordination problem. Again.
Solving these issues and answering the one-trillion-dollar “What is a DAO” question was the main reason for which we started this project. So, attempting an old-style Mission Statement, we may say that Āut is on a mission to accelerate the transition from an authoritarian, centralized, exploitative distribution of power - to non-hierarchical, more efficient, self-organizing organizational structures.
At the time of writing (May ’23), this is not (just) an Intro about how great Āut is – nor an extenuatingly-long list of some futuristic, confusing features.
Instead, this is a (re)genesis – an invitation to join the Coordination Renaissance.
It’s a stance that we are taking here and now, to invite you to join us in the journey to pave — brick-by-brick — the Coordination stack for decentralized organizations.
So here it is: this (re)Genesis article is an invitation, a doorway.
This is us opening the gates – to build a more open, human-shaped world together. An invitation to expand the concept of a DAO as we know it today – and join us in our journey.
Before getting to the Coordination dynamics, though, here are a couple of concepts (3) that can help you acclimatize to our ecosystem. If you’ve met us before, and we have already held you hostage in a 2+ hour conversation about them – feel free to skip this part :)
The truth is there are tens of “DAO Standards” in the Ethereum space. So many, in fact, that we have no standards at all. A “legacy” DAO Contract is any Smart Contract-powered DAO with existing members (and any sort of on-chain activity) that hasn’t yet been expanded through Āut. Legacy DAO Contracts include Moloch (V1, V2, V3), Aragon, DAOStack, Tribute Labs, etc. More about them here. This concept is deeply tied to the Expander, and we’ve worked on a DAO Contract “standardization”/expansion for so long that we even have a “SkillWallet Legacy” contract on the list.
A Nova is what comes after a Legacy DAO. It expands what we call a DAO today. Think of it as a “next-gen DAO” if you wish – or a DAO 2.0: a framework for expanded human Coordination at scale. That includes a Member’s Roles, Interactions & Reputation directly at the contract level. It is fully composable, allowing deployed Novas to add capabilities – “Modules & Plugins,” but more about them in a different place – to their on-chain community operations. And customize them as they please. Think of a Nova as a customizable, self-organized collective – where every Member has a Role and Commitment, a (portable) Reputation, and a (portable & unique) Identity to access the DAO ecosystem.
The main value of Āut is to expand the concept of DAO - from a list of 0x… addresses to a functional, coordinated group of individuals willing to create and achieve something together. Sort of embodiment of “The sum is greater than its parties.”
We do that by adding Roles directly at the DAO contract level.
A Role is a “self-sovereign label” that Members choose when they join a Community. Any time you create a new Task, Community Gathering, or Voting Routine - you can assign them to a specific Role, allowing easier Coordination and purposeful, non-hierarchical cooperation. In one sentence: if there is hope, it lies in the Roles.
Getting back to the Coordination Renaissance: soon will be publishing a separate article about the Beta dynamics – but for the scope of this article, we just wanted to share a little about the three (3) core products we are going to test together.
A. Expander
It’s the foundation and the entry point of the Āut Ecosystem. You can see it as a “Nova Launchpad” – allowing anyone to expand an existing Legacy DAO or deploy a Nova from scratch. Any expanded DAO, or brand-new Nova, includes the concepts of Members’ Role, Commitment & Interactions natively in their Community contract.
2. ĀutID
An individual ĀutID is a Non-Transferable NFT ID – a SBT, in modern terms. It’s the first self-sovereign identity that binds together an Individual to the Novas they join - and allows them to use their profile as a Portable Identity to join new communities and log in across the DAO Ecosystem. It works as a Social Profile that keeps track of all the DAOs, tasks, Roles, and Commitments of an individual holder, and it allows BUIDLers to build and deploy what we “DAO-powered DApps” – a new Web3 paradigm we will be shilling about in a couple of weeks. On a cooler note: any holder of an ĀutID has a unique, public URL with this structure: https://my.aut.id/your-name With a timestamp to showcase when they first joined the Coordination Renaissance (and their first Nova) in a unique, alluring card that looks like this:
3. Dashboard + Onboarding Quests
Āut Dashboard is the Operating System for Novas.
From your Dashboard, you can:
Manage Integrations, and add custom Modules & Plugins - such as additional Role-sets & onboarding strategies.
Launch role-based Quests & Invite your Community to join.
Automate Tasks & Voting routines, & assign them to a specific Role.
Check your Members' Activity and your Community Health.
Coordinate, Coordinate, Coordinate.
Let this be the "Year of [AI; ZK; ReFi; Jimmy-the-Bumfuzzle]."
Whatever this year will look like, we will still need to come together to solve the problems we want to solve (the hypercomplex, and the tragicomically simple ones). And ideally, we will try to enjoy and optimize the process so that we won't die while trying.
At the end of the day, every year was - and will always be - "the Year of Coordination." The only difference is that maybe, this year, we are just readier to cope with it than we were before.
We are still far from realizing a complete, accessible Coordination Stack for a more free and open world. So, once again, we need your help.
Join us. Coordinating is difficult – let’s do it better, together (and let's have some fun in the process).
It’s been in the making for some time, and finally – to celebrate this new year of Web3 – we are ready to introduce Āut Labs: a suite of DAO-native Tools to expand decentralized communities.
Now, 2023 is a particular year.
It comes after the golden era of DeFi (20-21), the Regen + DAO year of 2022, and in parallel with the ZK + AI rages of Q1 ’23. What does this leave us with? Have all these movements quickly risen and prematurely died? Are they all engaged in a blood fight with each other – where in the end, only one of them will emerge victorious, holding the heads of its opponents? Most certainly not.
Each and every Web3 trend is non-competitive by design. Therefore, the more development arises in each of these trends, the more the ecosystem enriches and grows. The power of composability, the holy grail of the technology we all love and hate from time to time.
Nonetheless, the more innovation we bring to the table, the more complexity we add – therefore, it gets harder and harder to progressively and mindfully incorporate and combine all these different aspects within a compounded whole. Especially when the offer is so varied and the approaches differ so widely from one another.
At the end of the day, whatever we call it, and however we see it – this is one of the most significant risks of Coordination Failure we incur as a group. And at one of the largest possible scales ever.
That’s why we consider 2023 the Year of Coordination (#YoC) – and, on the same vibe, this is an intro to Āut Labs’ Beta: the Coordination Renaissance— the first of its kind.
Before we start, if you missed SkillWallet, or you want to dive deeper into it: in a poignant overturn, here’s an article we shared recently, called Goodbye SkillWallet.
The very last article at SkillWallet’s name 🥲
Back to us: SkillWallet was born as “a wallet for your skills,” and SkillWallet Genesis became the first non-transferable NFT ID in existence. The first of what we now know as SBT, or “Soul-bound Token.”
It came as a claimable, self-sovereign ID, binding individual members together with the DAOs they are part of — and it was designed to power a free, fairer, and more open world for individuals and collectives.
This is a historic achievement — and with two (2.5*) years of work, five (5) products, and a suite of Contracts: SkillWallet is all but dead.
Rather, SkillWallet - the Identity & Reputation layer of Web3 - has evolved into a suite of DAO-native tools to push forward the limits of human Coordination.
If, on one side, SkillWallet was born out of the premise that it is the actor – the contributor, the participant – the atomic element of Coordination and decentralized systems as a whole – on the other, Āut is its logical continuation.
As rebranding took us almost a year, here are a few highlights of this soul searching process:
From Greek, āut means “Self” As in Self-Sovereign, or Self-governance.
As well as “Autonomous” → from Greek avtonomos → enforcing its own rules.
Āut is one’s own self. In open break with the status quo.
It also sounds like Out, and we like that.
i.e.: I got in, by getting [o/ā]ut.
Autonomy - within and beyond the digital borders of a community.
Listening to our Community, and in need to expand and complement what we started more than two years ago – Āut has evolved to be the V2 of SkillWallet.
In that sense, Āut is a workshop of innovation – aiming to collectively build the tools needed for a fully autonomous Coordination Stack for Web3 Governance and the decentralized world. Basically, the infrastructure and components that allow self-sovereignty to a community, a group of people, a digital country, or a digital nation. For them to be composable, human-shaped, and safe.
In a nutshell: Āut is a suite of DAO-native Membership & Governance Tools to expand Autonomy & Coordination in decentralized communities – and power the next generation of human Coordination.
If DAOs are to be the future of human Coordination (or at least try to be), we need some common ground to discuss them.
So, here’s a TL;DR of what DAOs are vs. what they can be today:
DAOs are groups of people first.
For this group of people to be a DAO, the Community needs to be powered by (and rely on) smart contracts that allow decentralized governance and track membership, access, and benefits+duties.
The atomic unit of DAOs is their Members, combined with their free interaction.
Currently, DAOs are a bit more than “Smart Treasuries” – where members can “pool together” their funds, and, in exchange for their capital, they receive equivalent benefits in either reputation, voting power, or shares. DAOs can be more than that.
DAOs can be functional groups of humans, coordinating with each other to “do things” – namely: tasks, projects, events, and any form of collaboration with each other. Potentially up to entire constitutions and Network States.
Based on the above, it sounds like everything is a DAO. So, what is a DAO, concretely?
It comes out that after almost three years since we started, there is still no standard definition of what a DAO is - and pretty much everybody has their own. DAOs are still like “love,” “art,” or “Laura Palmer” - nobody knows exactly who/what they are, or who killed them.
Attempting a 360° / 3D definition of idea vs. action in a DAO, we may quote what our Founder said last July @ETHBarcelona.
DAOs – decentralized autonomous organizations – are a completely different way to collaborate, communicate and work together. It’s this beautiful utopia where strangers on the Internet can get in cahoots with each other to launch a techno party in the forest, create a new financial system, or subvert the status quo.
Unfortunately, though, we are still far from realizing this vision – and DAOs have to face very old problems, such as centralization itself, where founders or a limited group of people are in charge of implementing collective decisions. This brings us back to the old pyramid of trust: multi-layered, hierarchical, and oligarchic by design. Similar to the state-machine - that DAOs have otherwise the potential to subvert.
So here you go: it’s a coordination problem. Again.
Solving these issues and answering the one-trillion-dollar “What is a DAO” question was the main reason for which we started this project. So, attempting an old-style Mission Statement, we may say that Āut is on a mission to accelerate the transition from an authoritarian, centralized, exploitative distribution of power - to non-hierarchical, more efficient, self-organizing organizational structures.
At the time of writing (May ’23), this is not (just) an Intro about how great Āut is – nor an extenuatingly-long list of some futuristic, confusing features.
Instead, this is a (re)genesis – an invitation to join the Coordination Renaissance.
It’s a stance that we are taking here and now, to invite you to join us in the journey to pave — brick-by-brick — the Coordination stack for decentralized organizations.
So here it is: this (re)Genesis article is an invitation, a doorway.
This is us opening the gates – to build a more open, human-shaped world together. An invitation to expand the concept of a DAO as we know it today – and join us in our journey.
Before getting to the Coordination dynamics, though, here are a couple of concepts (3) that can help you acclimatize to our ecosystem. If you’ve met us before, and we have already held you hostage in a 2+ hour conversation about them – feel free to skip this part :)
The truth is there are tens of “DAO Standards” in the Ethereum space. So many, in fact, that we have no standards at all. A “legacy” DAO Contract is any Smart Contract-powered DAO with existing members (and any sort of on-chain activity) that hasn’t yet been expanded through Āut. Legacy DAO Contracts include Moloch (V1, V2, V3), Aragon, DAOStack, Tribute Labs, etc. More about them here. This concept is deeply tied to the Expander, and we’ve worked on a DAO Contract “standardization”/expansion for so long that we even have a “SkillWallet Legacy” contract on the list.
A Nova is what comes after a Legacy DAO. It expands what we call a DAO today. Think of it as a “next-gen DAO” if you wish – or a DAO 2.0: a framework for expanded human Coordination at scale. That includes a Member’s Roles, Interactions & Reputation directly at the contract level. It is fully composable, allowing deployed Novas to add capabilities – “Modules & Plugins,” but more about them in a different place – to their on-chain community operations. And customize them as they please. Think of a Nova as a customizable, self-organized collective – where every Member has a Role and Commitment, a (portable) Reputation, and a (portable & unique) Identity to access the DAO ecosystem.
The main value of Āut is to expand the concept of DAO - from a list of 0x… addresses to a functional, coordinated group of individuals willing to create and achieve something together. Sort of embodiment of “The sum is greater than its parties.”
We do that by adding Roles directly at the DAO contract level.
A Role is a “self-sovereign label” that Members choose when they join a Community. Any time you create a new Task, Community Gathering, or Voting Routine - you can assign them to a specific Role, allowing easier Coordination and purposeful, non-hierarchical cooperation. In one sentence: if there is hope, it lies in the Roles.
Getting back to the Coordination Renaissance: soon will be publishing a separate article about the Beta dynamics – but for the scope of this article, we just wanted to share a little about the three (3) core products we are going to test together.
A. Expander
It’s the foundation and the entry point of the Āut Ecosystem. You can see it as a “Nova Launchpad” – allowing anyone to expand an existing Legacy DAO or deploy a Nova from scratch. Any expanded DAO, or brand-new Nova, includes the concepts of Members’ Role, Commitment & Interactions natively in their Community contract.
2. ĀutID
An individual ĀutID is a Non-Transferable NFT ID – a SBT, in modern terms. It’s the first self-sovereign identity that binds together an Individual to the Novas they join - and allows them to use their profile as a Portable Identity to join new communities and log in across the DAO Ecosystem. It works as a Social Profile that keeps track of all the DAOs, tasks, Roles, and Commitments of an individual holder, and it allows BUIDLers to build and deploy what we “DAO-powered DApps” – a new Web3 paradigm we will be shilling about in a couple of weeks. On a cooler note: any holder of an ĀutID has a unique, public URL with this structure: https://my.aut.id/your-name With a timestamp to showcase when they first joined the Coordination Renaissance (and their first Nova) in a unique, alluring card that looks like this:
3. Dashboard + Onboarding Quests
Āut Dashboard is the Operating System for Novas.
From your Dashboard, you can:
Manage Integrations, and add custom Modules & Plugins - such as additional Role-sets & onboarding strategies.
Launch role-based Quests & Invite your Community to join.
Automate Tasks & Voting routines, & assign them to a specific Role.
Check your Members' Activity and your Community Health.
Coordinate, Coordinate, Coordinate.
Let this be the "Year of [AI; ZK; ReFi; Jimmy-the-Bumfuzzle]."
Whatever this year will look like, we will still need to come together to solve the problems we want to solve (the hypercomplex, and the tragicomically simple ones). And ideally, we will try to enjoy and optimize the process so that we won't die while trying.
At the end of the day, every year was - and will always be - "the Year of Coordination." The only difference is that maybe, this year, we are just readier to cope with it than we were before.
We are still far from realizing a complete, accessible Coordination Stack for a more free and open world. So, once again, we need your help.
Join us. Coordinating is difficult – let’s do it better, together (and let's have some fun in the process).
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