Joining the Cabin community paves the path towards becoming a Citizen of the network. Currently, citizenship is limited to members who receive a vouch from an existing Citizen. In the coming years, 5,040 founding Citizens will be onboarded into the network to reach the number proposed by Aristotle for an ideal polis. 

To build such a growing community that spans the globe, trust among members is crucial. This is where Cabin's “Census” app comes in. It is an internal Citizen directory that allows members to showcase their Cabin experience and reputation in one place and express it on-chain. Members can display their roles, stamps, voting power, and citizenship on the Census app.

Every time a member participates in an online or offline gathering, they can collect Stamps. Stamps are a way for members to display their engagement and provide a cultural vibe-check by showing what someone has done with the community. Cabin has distributed thousands of stamps to members who have onboarded, attended events, completed residencies, and colived with Cabin across the world.

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Stamps are non-transferable NFTs stored decentrally on the Optimism blockchain, making them publicly verifiable by anyone (on this blog we also refer to them as “Badges”). For the creation and distribution of stamps, Cabin is using the Otterspace protocol. For past events, stamps were retroactively airdropped to attendees via the new Otterspace Airdrop functionality (Check out this post for more information on airdrops). To display stamp data, Cabin has integrated the Otterspace Subgraph in its Census app. 

“Otterspace has been great to work with the last several months! Their team is responsive and attentive to our needs. They've been a huge help getting stamps populated on our community members' profiles before we opened up beta testing for our Community Census product! They also sped up the release of their new airdropping feature which is a huge unlock for us. We're so grateful to be building with them and are excited for what's to come.” – Jon Dean, Gatherer at Cabin

By integrating the Otterspace protocol, Cabin has brought its stamps on-chain and made them publicly verifiable, providing a way for members to showcase their engagement and participation in the community. 

If you’d like to jump into the world of Cabin and start coliving and earning stamps, visit app.cabin.city to make your Census profile and get started!

If you're interested in using Otterspace Badges to build on-chain reputation, a community member experience, or integrating Badges into your app via the Otterspace protocol, you can book an intro call with us here. We’ve got a lot of exciting product updates including faster & easier Badge distribution, as well as, mutli-chain support coming up, so stay tuned.

Otterspace here, the newest addition to the Polygon network. We're thrilled to announce two new product updates:

1. Our launch on Polygon

2. The launch of our badge airdrop feature, making it easier than ever for our users to claim rewards and communities to issue them.

For those unfamiliar with Otterspace, we're a community-driven non-transferable NFT platform that allows communities and builders to create their own earned NFTs and issue them to eligible members. Joining the Polygon network allows us to offer even lower transaction fees and make Badges interoperable with the many other projects available on the network.

In addition, with our badge airdrop feature, users no longer have to manually claim their rewards. Badges can be automatically dropped into member’s wallets by the community admin, making it a seamless experience for everyone involved. This feature is a game-changer for both our users and creators, as it makes it easier than ever to distribute rewards and build your community.

We’ll always continue to offer all our other Badge issuance options, including allowlisting and requesting. Communities that want to continue with opt-in rewards can do so using either of these functionalities.

If you're interested in exploring the world of non-transferable NFTs and want to join a community that's all about creativity and engagement, come check out Otterspace and sign up to our waitlist.

With our badge airdrop feature, claiming rewards has never been easier. We can't wait to see you there!

TEA utilizes Otterspace for the creation and distribution of its proof-of-knowledge Badges. With Otterspace, TEA could reduce its implementation risk and increase roll-out speed. Given the higher cost, time investment, and risk of building non-transferable NFTs in-house, TEA opted against this alternative. Using Otterspace TEA was able to set up a smooth Badge claiming experience for its students, and build the fundaments for a long-term, trustworthy infrastructure for token engineering proofs of expertise.

"In 2020, only a select few cryptoeconomic researchers and builders were forging ahead in the field. Today, thousands of students are studying token engineering, contributing to a growing knowledge pool and greatly expanding hands-on experience in the field. So far, 750+ certificates have been minted for successful students of TE Fundamentals. These proofs of knowledge are just the first step in the reputation system that we envision. The goal is to create a system of NFT proofs that acknowledges and rewards various contributions that are relevant to building this new engineering field.”
- Angela Kreitenweis, Founder TE Academy

https://opensea.io/assets/0x7F9279B24D1c36Fa3E517041fdb4E8788dc63D25/78926702005091895112031158438988895440371680002901681482364709420158107162812

Students can access course materials and complete exams for each module in TEA’s comprehensive learning and development platform. Once students have linked their wallets to their student accounts and completed a module, along with the corresponding exam, they are eligible to receive their proof-of-knowledge Badge, which is presented as a non-transferable NFT certificate**.**

“We’ve enjoyed working with the Otterspace team, they have a clear roadmap and are determined to deliver on it. As beta users, we could share improvements and feature requests early on. The team’s drive to deliver product-market-fit gives us confidence that we are building on a great and sustainable product, which is critical for credentails, likes certificates, to be used long-term.”
- Angela Kreitenweise, Founder TE Academy

TE Academy, and its implementation partner General Magic, has directly integrated Otterspace's protocol into its platform. Meaning that claiming a Badge within TEA’s learning platform triggers the same smart contract functions as it would if you were to claim another community’s Badge within the Otterspace app. Using the protocol directly enabled TEA to customize the look and feel of the interaction to fit its specific app.

Over 90% of eligible students have claimed their Badge so far, indicating high demand for on-chain proof-of-knowledge and a high-quality user experience. Beyond supporting them in securing a role in Token Engineering, the Badges also provide an opportunity for students to get involved in the governance of the Token Engineering ecosystem. In the upcoming first Token Engineering Grants round led by TE Commons, the owners of TE Academy Badges will receive a voting boost, based on their validated expertise. This measure is aimed at increasing the quality of decision outcomes and enhancing sybil resistance in on-chain votes.

By leveraging Otterspace's capabilities, TEA has enabled its students to build their record of expertise on-chain and contribute to the development of a more robust and secure token engineering ecosystem. TEA has recently integrated new pricing for its courses and effectively combined Otterspace’s protocol with third-party payment providers to develop paid on-chain education credentials.

If you're interested in using Otterspace Badges to build education credentials, a community member experience, or integrating Badges into your app via the Otterspace protocol, you can book an intro call with us here. We’ve got a lot of exciting product updates including faster & easier Badge distribution, as well as, multi-chain support coming up, so stay tuned.

DAOs and tokenized communities that last year were taunted as the next evolution of the traditional corporation now have to come to terms with the fact that they have not yet built sustainable business models.

While many tokenized communities have yet to reach product market fit, they have built up a substantial community of members who have a high willingness to pay for gated content, channels, events, and other products.

The challenge with current business models is that they are highly cyclical, relying on token raises, PFP projects, and other one-time revenue-generating events that play into the speculative nature of crypto without revealing much underlying utility.

At Otterspace, we asked ourselves: “How can we help decentralized communities build a business model that leverages their existing assets and acquires new users, while also introducing more sustainable and predictable revenue streams that focus on the core value propositions of these communities?”

Introducing Subscription Badges

Meet our newest product drop: Subscription Badges, which addresses this question head-on.

With Subscription Badges, communities can monetize their existing member base by offering gated content, events, and other products that cater to their members' interests. In addition, our platform allows communities to acquire new users by capturing the unique value propositions of your community in a Badge, without your members having to surpass great UX/UI hurdles that are sadly still the reality in Web3 today.

By creating a more sustainable revenue stream, Badges solve the problem of relying on cyclical revenue models that only work during bull markets. Subscription Badges are designed to help decentralized communities thrive and grow, providing long-term benefits for both the communities and their members.

We’ve been supporting communities with membership Badges for many months – adding a subscription option is a simple extension of our existing functionality. You can turn any Badge into a Subscription Badge by setting the monthly cost of a membership. If a member stops paying for their membership, their Badge is automatically revoked.

Sign up to the Alpha 👉🏻 here.

Subscription Badges allow you to:

1. Turn any Badge into a Subscription Badge and set the amount of your subscription, payment method (fiat / crypto) and term (annual / monthly).

2. Associate permissions with this Subscription Badge, such as providing members of your community access to Discord, Snapshot, Notion, Wonderverse etc.

3. Subscription Badge will remain active and retain all the permissions as long as the subscription is active. If the subscription expires or the member cancels the subscription, Badge permissions will be revoked automatically.

Join us today and see for yourself how Subscription Badges can help your community build a sustainable and profitable business model.

Sign up to the Alpha 👉🏻 here.

Web3, DAOs and tokenized communities have evolved and grown in the last 12 months, and we’re grateful to be learning and evolving alongside them. We want to say a big thanks to our set of early core customers who've allowed us to build alongside them while maintaining an experimental spirit and trust in our product development capabilities. Shoutout to BanklessDAO, DeveloperDAO, Radicle, CabinDAO, Optimism, Token Engineering Academy, Protein, PrimeDAO, CowDAO and many more.

To hold ourselves publicly accountable, we're committing to ship at least one big product improvement per month starting March 1st. We'll announce these features on Twitter and our blog on Mirror, so stay tuned! Sign up now to get access:

https://forms.otterspace.xyz/waitlist

However, before we get carried away, this post is focused on the here and now. Today, we’re launching 6 big updates (+ 1 bonus update), so buckle up 🔥

Request Badges

Thus far, community admins have manually issued Badges to members in their communities. While this is a great way to share Badges, we’ve learned from admins that there are a couple of downsides with this approach:

• Oftentimes admins need to know (or collect) the wallet addresses of members, which is tedious and time-consuming.

• Adding a large number of wallet addresses can be painful, especially in larger communities.

• Communities oftentimes want to pay gas costs on behalf of their members.

• Members want to be able to ask for a Badge rather than waiting for it to drop in their laps.

We're proud to present the Request Flow, which allows members to request Badges from communities they believe they should be given in a matter of seconds, entirely gasless. All that's needed is a Discord account and a wallet to sign a transaction. Boom! The Badge request is sent to the community admin. Community managers can easily review Badge requests, cross-reference wallet addresses with members’ Discord IDs, and approve them.

👉🏻 Join our Discord server and navigate to the landing pad to request the ‘Ottercurious’, ‘Ottester’ or ‘Early Otter’ Badge, if you want to try out the request flow in action 🔥

But this is not the end…

Otterspace doubles down on Discord

Requesting a Badge involves authenticating with Discord. This is useful because it both allows the admin to easily identify requesters and enables the Otter bot to DM community members when their request has been approved. Our Discord bot sends a personal DM and a link for members to claim a Badge. No more personally chasing people!

This is just the beginning of a deeper integration with Discord. In the future, members will also be able to create, issue, and claim Badges entirely from within Discord and send messages to specific Badge holders.

Otterspace now enables collaboration mode (protocol only)

One common request we’ve heard from communities is that they want to share admin powers without relying on Safe multisig. While Safe is a great tool for stewarding funds, it’s not so great for the creation of Badges, as the Safe UX is not optimized for usage with dApps.

Otterspace Protocol users are now able to use their super admin account to add and remove community admins. Admins are able to create, issue and manage Badges alongside the super admin. At the moment, this feature is available in the protocol only, but will be coming to the Otterspace app very soon.

Otterspace at scale

Bulk allowlisting has been live for a while, but we have increased the scale at which you can issue Badges. With Otterspace, you can now allowlist up to 10k wallets at a time using a comma-separated list. The form helps you easily clean up duplicates and invalid addresses before submitting the allowlist, so you don’t have to manually sift through a Google sheet.

Otterspace goes multi-chain

To better support communities that want to use Badges for on-chain voting and integration with existing infrastructure, we’re releasing the Otterspace protocol and app to multiple chains. The chains on our immediate roadmap are Mainnet and Polygon.

Task management with Wonderverse

We now have an integration with Wonderverse! Communities can now create a guild on https://www.wonderverse.xyz and Badge-gate specific bounties and tasks in that guild. Think of making certain tasks or projects available to certain Badge types, which could be roles or members of specific teams.

Bonus mention: A new website

Our website got a paint job! We've updated our website to better communicate our value props and use cases. Check it out at

Otterspace

Otterspace's non-transferable badge protocol helps DAOs create better incentive systems, automate permissions and enable non-financialized governance.

https://www.otterspace.xyz

➡️ Sign up now and get access

We're now accepting additional signups to our product. Just sign up on the following link to get access (we will prioritize the first 100 signups):

https://forms.otterspace.xyz/waitlist

If you're already an active user of Otterspace, you’ll be able to use these improvements starting from today. Reach out to us on Discord if you have any questions or feedback.

Stay tuned for our updates by hitting the subscribe button here on Mirror or follow us on Twitter. We have a bunch of exciting things coming up in the following months, including an open API and subscription Badges for paid membership!

With a history dating back to 1997, Protein comprises a global network of cultural creators who collaborate online and in person. Protein is dedicated to fostering "good growth" - a balance between progress, profit, and purpose. Among others, Protein runs an agency working with leading brands, including Nike or Jaegermeister, to provide research, strategic insights, and reports. In addition, Protein is building a co-working space and event space in the heart of London.

Protein is adopting the latest Web3 coordination primitive with Protein Community

Over the years, Protein has launched a variety of innovative projects, such as the Protein Journal, Supplement, Studios, and Podcast, all of which reflect its unwavering commitment to staying on the cutting edge of culture. With the launch of the $PRTN token in 2021, the Protein Community is now harnessing the power of web3 technology to bring together brilliant minds to collaboratively discover and incubate projects that align with their Good Growth values.

Recently, the community started producing research reports and wants to use Web3 primitives to track and acknowledge their members' contributions. The Protein Community wants to build a frictionless onboarding process a.k.a Protein’s Cohort Based Onboarding for members, that is easy to administrate on the community side. As an evolution of their Season Pass NFT’s they sought a single platform with visual Badge capabilities that could bridge the contributor experience between Discord and Badges.

“As a community designer bringing together online communities in Web 2.0 and Web 3.0, I had the chance to test and operate many platforms and tools. My natural inclination when choosing the right platform to incorporate with the online community is its intuitive design, friendly team for troubleshooting, and incorporation of feedback into the platform. Otterspace ticked the right boxes so we are happy to be partnering with them!” – dindin.eth, Head of Community at Protein

Onboarding members with the Season 5 Pass

Starting January 2023, members can onboard into the community using their new non-transferable season pass, which allows them to showcase their membership visually through Badges. This new onboarding process is user-friendly for new joiners and saves community managers time through automating Discord role administration.

As a first step in adopting the new Badge system, the Protein Community is bringing its membership structure on-chain with its Season 5 Passes. This is a significant step forward for the community, as it builds a more robust and inclusive community that values its members' contributions.

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Protein Community’s season 5 pass is a non-transferable NFT that all new members receive upon joining. Through Otterspace and Guild's integration, members gain automatic access to relevant content in Protein's Discord server, while the community team saves time by reducing the manual work on Discord role assignments. The passes self-expire at the end of the season on April 30th, representing a member’s past membership after that and ensuring that members that become inactive don’t retain Discord accesses which they should not. Given their composable nature, Protein can use the Badges in other Web3 tools down the line, such as Snapshot.

The Protein team worked with Otterspace to create unique animated visuals and roll out their new branding for the season passes.

Already, over 30 members have gained access to Protein's community through their new membership Badges. These Badges can be viewed in members' profiles, wallets, OpenSea, and other dApps, and can be used with Guild.xyz to gain access to Discord roles.

If you're interested in using Otterspace Badges to build your community's membership structure, join our waitlist here to learn more. We’ve got a lot of exciting product updates including faster & easier Badge distribution, as well as, multi-chain support coming up, so stay tuned.

Grants Committee membership was intransparent and voting informal

One of the responsibilities of CoW DAO is the management of the CoW Grants Program, which allocates resources to projects that further the CoW Protocol ecosystem. The Grants Committee, which is made up of 7 members, oversees the program and votes on projects to fund.

Previously, membership of the committee was visible through the Grants Committee Safe. Each member was a signer on the Safe and voted to fund projects by approving Safe transactions in a closed format. Once new projects were approved, the committee executed the grant through a proposed transaction on Safe.

After some time, the CoW Grants committee recognized that this process lacked visibility to the wider community. The decision-making process around approving grants was also unclear and intransparent, as grants were approved informally without a public vote by the committee members.

Badges make membership public with voting carried out on Snapshot

To address these issues, the team introduced Otterspace Badges to represent membership of the CoW DAO Grants Committee and use these to vote on grants in a new Snapshot space. Each of the 7 committee members received a CoW Grants Committee Member Badge. By holding this badge, committee members have one vote on grant proposals and can publicly exercise their vote on Snapshot.

Decisions on grant proposals are now more public and transparent within the DAOs Snapshot space. Anyone can visit the CoW Grants Committee Snapshot sub-space and see the grant proposals, their outcomes, and who voted in favor or against. Additionally, membership on the Grants Committee itself is now visualized through the ownership of a Badge - displayed in the wallets of the committee members.

The flexibility of the Otterspace Snapshot Strategy also leaves room for new opportunities for structuring grant proposal votes. Multiple tokens can be combined into a voting strategy. For example, holders of the CoW token or a different committee Badge could be invited to participate in a grant proposal vote. By starting with building membership of the Grants Committee using Otterspace Badges, the committee has created a foundation on which further membership structures can be built and improve the transparency, visibility, and decision-making process.

If you’re interested in building the membership of your DAO using Badges, joinhere.

Early in 2022, the team set out to “design and implement a strategy for distributing non-financialized governing power within the Radicle ecosystem (…).”

The team is working towards building a DAO structure using Badges with the goal of improving the distribution of influence and building a more robust governance foundation. In order to increase decentralization further and further, the team is proposing to implement Otterspace Badges in the RadicleDAO to better enumerate members and provide a flexible tool for improved governance.

The Goal

The initial proposal aimed to work with the Otterspace team to build a robust and self-sustaining system of membership and later governance within the DAO using non-transferable Badges.

These Badges would be distributed and held by members of the RadicleDAO based on their roles and participation. They would also potentially hold additional governance rights and access permissions in the future. By doing this, the DAO will be able to distribute influence among participants in a more nuanced way, further allocating governance power beyond that held by $RAD token holders.

The Implementation

The RadicleDAO Grants Team was used as a pilot project to experiment with Badges as a core DAO tool. The expansion to further groups is planned for Q1 2023. The current RadicleDAO ecosystem is designed as a network of organizations (called orgs) that fund interconnected teams. This model helps RadicleDAO to distribute power, embed resilience, and ensure self-organization.

The Otterspace Protocol enables RadicleDAO and its sub-orgs (i.e. the Radicle grants team, the core development org etc.) to be represented by a 'Raft Token', which is held by a multisig to decentralize control. Each Radicle organization creates, issues, and manages its own Badges, while still being related to the RadicleDAO parent organization in their metadata. This means that all Badges, while being managed locally at the org level, can still be recognized throughout the entire DAO.

As a first step to implementation, Radicle will introduce membership/role Badges. The definition and distribution of these Badges are handled by the respective org. For example: the Core Development Org has three teams and creates Badges called ‘Community Team Contributor’, ‘Funding Team Contributor’, and ‘Clients Team Contributor’. The org then proceeds to issue Badges to everyone who fits these roles based on previously agreed-upon rules.

Future proposals

RadicleDAO also envisions more use cases with Otterspace Badges in future proposals:

Distributing Influence

Creating a hybrid influence system that will call for the delegation of a percentage of $RAD (Radicle coin) from the treasury among Badge holders in Radicle’s Core Development Org. The DAO will be able to decide how much and to which Badge holders $RAD should be distributed. In this model, both coin and Badge holders can participate in the same governance process and ensure that active contributors can exert influence.

Governance

Badges can be used for on-chain governance with Otterspace's Snapshot integration. Radicle envisions voting with Badges as a decentralized way for respective orgs to make decisions within their organizational structure. This mechanism will ensure the further distribution of influence and would be another step towards more decentralized decision-making.

Further, Badges could become a way of measuring and representing reputation within RadicleDAO’s orgs and create a means to delegate governing power in a more dynamic fashion.

Permissions

Badges can be used to grant and manage access permissions to tools such as Discord or shared documents. This can reduce the time needed to manually manage permissions significantly, for example: Discord roles can be granted automatically based on which Badges a contributor holds in combination with Otterspace’s Guild integration.

Decentralizing an organization is no simple feat, and there are still many challenges to overcome as we build out these organizations of the future. Radicle is leading the way in thoughtfully structuring its DAO and building a solid foundation for self-sustaining governance. At Otterspace we’re excited to be along on this journey to build out a long-term membership and governance structure using Badges.

If you are curious about improving your DAO’s membership structure with Otterspace Badges, join our community here to learn more.

Bankless DAO kickstarted its journey when David Hoffman and Ryan Sean Adams airdropped 35,000 BANK tokens to each Bankless premium subscriber. Since then, the organization has primarily operated through Discord, the Bankless DAO Forum, and Snapshot.

However, managing membership properties such as community level and Guild membership via Discord role tags can be a challenge. These off-chain roles are difficult to oversee, vulnerable to being gamed, and cannot easily interoperate with other Web3 functionality. That's why Bankless DAO has introduced Otterspace Badges, a trusted and transparent on-chain system for managing membership.

Bankless DAO was using off-chain Discord role tags to designate membership.

Bankless DAO previously managed membership properties, like someone’s community level or Guild membership, via Discord role tags. Some of these roles are issued automatically, for example when a member selects a Guild via a Discord bot and receives the Guild member role. Other roles, like the Level 2 role, were issued manually by server admins. Level 2 status requires having 35,000 BANK tokens and nominations from other Level 2 members.

These off-chain Discord roles are difficult to oversee, vulnerable to being gamed, and cannot interoperate with other Web3 functionality.

The Guild election polls are managed via a Discord bot (sesh.fyi) which allows any Guild role holder to vote on who is elected into Guild leadership positions. Because gaining access to the role is completely permissionless, the election system is vulnerable to being gamed.

The enduring nature of Discord role tags also meant that dormant members retain their access and powers, both to vote and participate in discussions. It was hard to manually keep track of member activity and remove stale role tags. This especially presented a challenge in the case of inactive Level 2 role holders who maintained considerable permissions in the server.

Badges bring Bankless DAO membership into a trusted, on-chain system.

The Level 2 Badge is a non-transferable NFT that represents a member's status as a trusted member of the community. By holding the Badge, 35,000 BANK tokens, and the Season 6 Participant Badge, members can automatically claim the Level 2 Discord role and temporary access to certain spaces via Collab.Land. This ensures that membership status is continuously visible and verifiable on the blockchain, and allows for the potential for automatic expiration based on on-chain criteria in the future.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x7F9279B24D1c36Fa3E517041fdb4E8788dc63D25/71783447856310129629557847785665241607275515843032695875597068569584326869116

The Season 6 Participant Badge, on the other hand, is an expiring Badge that represents a member's participation in the current season. Similar to the Level 2 Badge, holders of the Season 6 Participant Badge can automatically claim the Level 1 Discord role if they also hold 35,000 BANK tokens. However, this Badge will automatically expire at the end of the season, ensuring that inactive members do not maintain access in the next season.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x7F9279B24D1c36Fa3E517041fdb4E8788dc63D25/61244462256224709557697377737598293002758172245923890997765784609684787833093

Otterspace Badges not only serve as a reliable way to manage membership within Bankless DAO, but they also act as visual mementos that represent a member's contribution and experience within the organization. These Badges can be displayed in wallets and across other dApps, and can even be collected to create an on-chain record of skills and experience from various projects. And if a member ever wants to dissociate themselves from Bankless DAO, they can simply burn their Badge.

Implementing Badges

To pilot Otterspace within the DAO, the Ops Guild decided to start by focusing on two Badges: the Level 2 Badge and the Season 6 participant Badge. Creating the Badge specs is a 4-step process:

• Pick a Badge name

• Upload Badge artwork

• Select expiry date (optional)

• Register Badge spec on chain

Once Badge specs are created, they can be set up within a Collab.Land token gate, by selecting ‘Otterspace Badge’ as the token type and inputting the Badge name.

Badge specs act as the ‘blueprint’ from which Badges are minted. To allow members to mint a Badge from a spec, their addresses are added to the allowlist. Bulk allowlisting makes it possible to add hundreds of members to the list with a single signature.

So far, approximately 200 addresses have been allowlisted across both Badges. After being allowlisted, members are able to sign in to Otterspace and mint their Badge(s). The Badge can then be viewed in their profile, wallet, OpenSea, or other dApps in addition to being used with Collab.Land to gain access to Discord roles.

If you are curious about building your DAO’s membership structure with Otterspace Badges, join our community here to learn more.

Although they are similar to NFTs, Badges are different in one crucial way: they cannot be bought and sold. Badges are earned NFTs that communities use to represent nuanced aspects of membership.

Communities are not homogenous, and neither should the tokens used to represent their membership. Badges represent things like levels within a community, tenure, elected roles, and sub-community membership. Sub-groups within the community might have their own membership Badge - the Engineering Guild Member Badge - for example.

There may also be specific role Badges, like the “Engineering Guild Lead” Badge, or project-based Badges like the “Translation Project Member” Badge.

By bringing these characteristics on-chain through Badges, communities can automate access to spaces like Discord channels, resources like Google Docs, and voting via Snapshot.

The open-source Otterspace protocol is a secure way to bring community membership on-chain. Badges can have expiration dates to match the end of the season and be revoked in case of abuse.

Keeping track of community membership is manual, messy and off-chain

If at all, community members are usually organized via role tags in Discord. While automated assignment via bots is possible, roles quickly become stale and need to be manually removed by community managers in order to preserve community integrity. It is easy to lose the oversight of role tags and corresponding channels, especially in large communities.

In addition, dormant members who maintain high levels of access through Discord roles can present a security vulnerability, especially if Discord accounts are unused and hacked.

Beyond issues around manual assignment, one key challenge with the status quo is that off-chain roles are tied to the platform on which they are issued, and cannot be utilized across other Web3 spaces and apps. Web3 communities that aspire to an on-chain, decentralized culture rely on off-chain roles belonging to a web2 walled garden.

Why Badges for community membership?

Badges are a publicly declared, automated, and trusted representation of a community member’s role, level, or affiliation within a community. As NFTs, they are a visual representation of someone’s membership, worn with pride across Web3 spaces. Since they expire instead of being burned, Badges can be used as a record of history to display roles and memberships previously held. This allows them to be used to infer someone’s reputation, experience, and skills.

A delightful, clear, and simple membership system is essential to community coherence and member experience. Members receive a digital object to represent their affiliation and display it across Web3 social profiles.

Bringing membership on-chain is also important for philosophical alignment between community practices and values. The full potential of the decentralized internet can only be realized once important roles, affiliations, and experiences can be connected with your on-chain identity.

The more complete a community’s on-chain membership, the more permissions, powers, and perks can be automated. Assigning Discord roles based on Badge holding is table stakes, but Badges can also be used to boost governance power over specific decisions, grant access to resources or receive funding. Coordination within the community can be automated with the help of Badges.

Subscribe to read more about how to improve coordination with Badges.

Or join Otterspace to try Badges in your community.

Both the genius of this technology and its curse is the fact that it holds units of value at its core - programmable blockchains run on tokens, and enable the trustless transfer of value between network participants. Given the inherent value-exchange-based nature of early blockchains, the first generation of applications has been centered around finance and trading, and the open and unregulated nature of the space has invited legitimate investors, speculators, and fraudsters alike.

But behind the hyped-up casino (as Mario Gabriele put it), lies another place. In this place, network participants use tokens to share ownership of collective resources and coordinate the stewardship of those resources. While Web3 will always operate on the exchange of tokens, we should take this time to reflect on how we can build it to look less like a casino and more like a flourishing ecosystem.

We’re firm believers that non-financial applications, social identity, and decentralization drive the path to a better Web3. The foundations have been laid for the next generation of applications to be less concerned about trading, finance, and speculation. We see the biggest near-term opportunity for non-financial applications of Web3 in gaming, social, and media - where blockchains are used to give users power over their online experience, digital objects, and algorithms. Non-financial applications like Farcaster and Mirror, and protocols like Lens offer real utility and improvements over their Web2 counterparts. The crypto casino culture is less likely to survive a world in which utility is prioritized over get-rich-quick schemes.

A prerequisite to a flourishing ecosystem of non-financial applications is a foundational identity system. ERC20 tokens unlocked trustless exchange and shared ownership, but without social reputation and identity, network participants suffer no consequences for anti-social behavior. We expect DAOs and non-financial dApps to incorporate elements of pseudonymous social reputation and rewards, thereby reshuffling incentives and hopefully deterring extractive self-interested behavior. Otterspace and several other projects are building the primitives to power this capability. We hope to contribute to an ecosystem where individuals are recognized and rewarded for pro-social behavior and scammers and sybils are thwarted.

Collective interest is also an important theme when considering the value of decentralization. By distributing ownership and stewardship of a collective resource to a large group, we contribute to its resilience. In the case of centralized control over a resource, a single ‘weak link’ can compromise the whole project with one or two poor decisions. Collective governance might be slower but can protect against rogue actors and may also lead to wiser decisions. As we build in the wake of the FTX crash, we must uphold the value of decentralization and strive for a less skewed distribution of power, ownership, and control in the space.

The implosion of FTX hasn’t weakened our belief in the power of blockchain technology, if anything it has strengthened our conviction in decentralization and non-financial Web3 applications. We are optimistic that the space will emerge stronger in the wake of this crash, and are committed to continuing to build towards a flourishing decentralized, user-owned and operated Web3 ecosystem.

In the time since their rise, corporations have come to hold a foundational role in many societies, acting as providers of stable work and income for most individuals. In countries that have strong social provisions like sick leave, health insurance, and parental leave, many of these are administered through corporate employers. 

DAOs offer a promising path forward in enabling large-scale shared ownership and coordination of individuals, thereby disrupting the traditional corporate model of employment. In their current form, DAOs require workers to operate as self-employed individuals, thereby completely removing the ‘employer role’ from the equation, enabling workers to freely design their labor and commitment, but often taking away employer-based social provisions. 

Reimagining the future of work

Doing work within a DAO can take various forms, and in many ways, DAOs invite us to reimagine the future of work. Task-based and project-based work is common within DAOs, but many contributors also work on a part-time or full-time basis in a manner similar to salaried employees. In addition, governance participation and delegation can be considered work, as it requires voters to research and inform themselves before making a decision. 

By enabling participants to engage in a variety of different ways with lower commitment than is typical in traditional employment, DAOs are able to provide more flexibility and self-directedness than most employers.

However, the downside of this flexibility is that DAO workers must take on more risk by foregoing the benefits of traditional employment. The role of corporations in many societies has evolved to act as a provider of stability and mediator between an individual and social benefits such as health insurance and unemployment protection. 

This role cannot be overstated in many European countries such as Germany. Employees benefit from protections against arbitrary termination, unemployment insurance in the case of layoffs, parental leave, health insurance contributions, and retirement contributions. In addition, employees holding permanent contracts have vastly increased leverage when it comes to financial matters like applying for a mortgage.

Unfortunately, this means that in its current form, DAO work is unrealistic for those unable or unwilling to take on such risks. DAOs may inadvertently exclude whole groups of people if they don’t examine the role they play in providing stability and security to their workers.

DAOs as employers

There are several different ways in which we may imagine DAOs could offer more security to their workers. There is likely not one right answer, but a combination of tools that can be used depending on the DAO and the type of working relationship between the DAO and worker.

First off, it must be said that if a DAO wants to facilitate the same exact benefits as a traditional employer, it must have legal entities in the countries in which it has workers, or operate through third-party legal entities to provide employment. This might seem ludicrous and antithetical to the DAO mission, but it could be a realistic scenario for some organizations. Whether this is an attractive and feasible situation depends on a few factors.

As was clearly laid out by Vitalik Buterin in his recent post, there are some organizations that rely on decentralization for censorship resistance and credible neutrality. For these kinds of organizations, employing workers via traditional legal entities is likely neither desirable nor possible.

Other types of organizations may not be as dependent on legal decentralization, and could consider operating a state-recognized organization. In fact, many organizations on the DAO spectrum have both a traditional corporate entity and a DAO, allowing regular workers to be salaried employees if they choose.

DAOs providing employment-like benefits

Assuming that becoming recognized as legal entities by governments is neither possible nor desirable, DAOs could voluntarily implement and fund internal policies related to vacation, parental leave, health insurance contribution, notice periods, sick leave, etc. for their contributors. While these benefits may not flow through regular legal entities or be government recognized, they can approximate the types of benefits and stability that traditional employment provides.

This is more straightforward to do for part-time or full-time regular contributors, but may be more challenging for the task- or project-based workers. If someone is a full-time contributor to a DAO for a period of time, it is easy to imagine how that DAO might facilitate regular payment even during sick leave, parental leave, or vacation time. Project- or task-based workers are likely to spread their time across several DAOs or even DAOs plus offline work, so their working structure looks a lot more like self-employment.

In this case, DAOs can financially compensate for the additional risk taken on by workers. This is typically seen in self-employment - those working freelance charge significantly higher hourly rates than a comparable salaried employee earns. This model is what is typically seen in DAOs, but it is worth exploring alternative configurations of benefits in order to attract the widest variety of workers. 

DAOs as states providing social benefits

This brings me to a final consideration of the role that DAOs can play in society. As communities grow larger, stronger, and more networked, we can come closer to the vision of a network state, in which individuals belong to a “highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world”. 

Instead of DAOs playing the role of the corporation in a society where social benefits are distributed via employers, DAOs can begin to play the role of the state distributing the social benefits. 

Workers could do work within organizations that are nested in a network state, and as part of that receive social benefits from the state. This model could support benefits for task- and project-based workers independent of which organizations in the network they do work for. For example, all workers within a network state might receive vacation and parental leave allowance, insurance against loss of work, and sick leave.

Instead of relying on traditional financial providers for loans, workers in a network state could apply to DAO lenders that are able to accurately assess the earning potential and risk profile of applicants. Some network states may provide universal basic income or similar programs in order to secure the livelihoods of their members. While the idea of the network state is still in its infancy, it is worth further exploring this path as a possible future for the evolution of DAOs.

DAOs are emergent

DAOs are an emergent phenomenon and are in a state of rapid evolution - there is no a priori definition of a DAO or set of DAO rules. We are already seeing DAOs behave more like a cluster of similar organizations than a clear-cut category. As these organizations adapt and evolve, it is important to make decisions about their nature based on first principles and practical experience, rather than assuming a certain set of rules or practices must be followed top-down by all. As such, we mustn’t assume that a specific model of employment is the best or the only way ‘to DAO’. I’d like to invite us to think critically about how we structure DAOs so as to include the widest variety of people and models of work.

sassal.eth/acc 🦇🔊

@sassal0x

To be honest I expect this to happen with every app now

Unfortunately these sanctions are so ill-thought out and so strict that people can now just withdraw funds from Tornado Cash to any address they want and get it blacklisted

665

12:37 AM • Aug 13, 2022

This is exactly why we programmed consent into the fundamental building block of Otterspace Badges – a non-transferable token (NTT) protocol that binds a token to an account, our take on the now-very-popular “SoulBound Tokens” (SBT), coined by Vitalik Buterin and further expanded by Puja Ohhlaver & Glen Weyl in their paper around Decentralized Society. We did this by building consent into the EIP-4973 standard itself.

While there are many misconceptions around SBTs / NTTs which we have previously covered, in this post we want to share our approach to building fully consensual minting mechanics that are baked into the very core of the protocol.

What is consent, really? It can be thought of as giving permission for something to happen or establishing an agreement to do something. There are generally two cases of how a token might land in an account:

1. It is minted into existence from a contract to an account

2. It is transferred from one account to another

Within the context of an NTT, the second case is irrelevant as it is restricted. In the world of smart contract programming, a transfer is nothing but a remapping of balances of two parties involved in a single unit of transaction. A contract can be made non-transferable by restricting this remapping.

In the case of minting a token into existence, ERC721 models allow for tokens to be minted from a smart contract to any account. Our goal with EIP4973 was to add consent into this mechanism, while also ensuring maximum backward compatibility with ERC721 to allow for easy recognition by wallets, indexers, and dApps. This has proven to be an interesting challenge, as the ERC721 specification allows you to mint a token to an account without the holder’s consent.

Introducing fully consensual minting using EIP712

EIP712 defines a standard API for Web3 Providers (like wallets) to generate signatures over human-readable data where the signature can be verified either by a Smart Contract on the Ethereum Blockchain or completely off-chain.

In the case of Otterspace Badges, we knew we needed the account holder to consent to receive the token, but we also needed the Badge issuer to consent to the account receiving the Badge. In other words, we had to build a model that required the consent of both parties before a Badge could be minted to an account.

‘Take’ - Account holders mint tokens to their wallets themselves

This process begins with the Badge issuer consenting to an account receiving the Badge.

Here is an example of how that would look: After designing a Badge Spec with a unique token URI, Linas wants to issue a Badge to Jeong. They consent to Jeong minting the Badge by signing using EIP712. Jeong can now mint the Badge to their wallet by signing a transaction, which is another form of giving consent.

Another way of thinking about this process is that Linas has signed to add Jeong’s address to an allowlist for minting the Badge. This is Linas’ way of giving consent. Jeong then consents to receive the Badge by minting it to their wallet.

‘Give’ - Account holders sign their consent to receive a token

This process begins with the Badge claimer consenting to receive the Badge to their account.

For example, after designing a Badge Spec with a unique token URI, Linas invites community members to request the Badge. Jeong signs a transaction using EIP712  to request the Badge. This is their way of providing consent to receive the Badge. Linas can now give their consent by minting the Badge to Jeong’s wallet.

Another way of thinking about this process is that Jeong has consented by adding their wallet to the Badge request list. Linas then approves the request by minting the Badge to Jeong’s wallet.

‘Unequip’ for fully consented disassociation

We believe that the holder of a token should have the authority to fully dissociate from it. While ERC721 implicitly allows this through the transfer function, EIP4973 supports this via a function called ‘unequip’. The holder of an EIP4973 token is able to burn the token from their account via the unequip function. This ensures that a token holder has not only consented to receive the token but also continuously consents to it staying in their account.

** **

As builders in Web3, it is our responsibility to design protocols to be abuse-resistant. This is especially true in the case of non-transferable tokens, which make possible new dynamics and forms of misuse. Since the publication of the Decentralized Society paper earlier this year, the Ethereum community has responded with a wealth of feedback and ideas. We are excited to share how we have addressed these concerns within the EIP4973 primitive itself, and we invite the builders of other primitives to think deeply about the topic of consent as well. As we saw with the Tornado Cash incident, consent is a topic that concerns all types of token transactions, not just the soulbound kind.

If you’re interested in using Otterspace Badges to introduce non-financial dynamics into your community, head to otterspace.xyz and step into the Otterverse.

The Otternauts have been busy designing their Badges and bringing humans into the Otterverse to improve coordination and slay Moloch. As their mission has grown, they decided to bring a special group of intrepid explorers on board their Otter spaceship to help scale the impact of their work.

We’re otterly excited to announce that earlier this year we brought a stellar set of backers on board our Otter spaceship and raised $3.7M in pre-seed funding. Our investment round was co-led by Cherry Crypto and Inflection.xyz, both of whom share our vision for the future of Web3 and DAOs. Alongside our lead investors, we are lucky to have support from Bessemer Venture Partners, Coinbase Ventures, btov Partners, Paua Ventures, Tiny.vc and 35 Web3 operators and DAO builders, including Fredrik Haga & Mats Olsen (Dune Analytics), Abbey Titcomb (Radicle DAO), Will Papper (Syndicate), Sarah Drinkwater (Gitcoin), David (Metastreet), Sandeep Nailwal (Polygon), Konstantin Lomashuk (Lido), Eylon Aviv (DxDAO), Quickrider (FlamingoDAO), Alp Ergin (Prime DAO), Maex Ament & Philip Stehlik (Centrifuge), Chen Magen (CoW Swap), Scott Fitsimones (CityDAO), Vishesh Choudhry (MakerDAO), NiMA (SeedClub Ventures), Fabien (Snapshot), Peter Grosskopf (Ultimate Money), Mario Goetze, Concept Ventures, nxgen, Atka, the DAOJones collective and many more.

We also want to give a special shout-out to the early believers who participated in our NFT crowd-sale (psst! It’s technically still open) when Otterspace was just a spark in our minds. We are grateful for your support and have created a special Badge which you can claim here.

Thank you also to the many DAOs who have brainstormed, co-created, tested, provided feedback, and supported us on this journey. A big shout-out goes out to Shark DAO, MetaStreet, Radicle DAO, Bankless DAO, Prime DAO, Token Engineering Commons, Juicebox, Token Engineering Academy as well as the teams from Optimism, Snapshot, Guild, and Sobol.

We founded Otterspace with the belief that DAOs hold the potential to act as the organizing principle of a user-owned and operated internet. Our mission is to bring them into the mainstream by addressing a core cluster of challenges faced by many Web3 communities over the past years including plutocracy, governance disengagement, lack of clear participation paths, bureaucracy, and hyper-financialization. We believe that these challenges arise from the limitations of running an organization using solely a fungible, tradable token as the basis for coordination.

We are working towards this mission by providing distributed, digitally-native organizations with a new, non-financial coordination primitive to enable richer interactions and a more nuanced model of participation. We believe that this is a key missing piece in enabling them to scale to a mainstream level.

With the tool of non-transferable Badges, DAOs are able to address plutocracy without sacrificing sybil-resistance, distinguish between different types of network members, use social recognition as an incentive, and automatically distribute power and influence based on roles and reputation.

There are two primary reasons why we decided to pursue fundraising from a large set of investors rather than raising purely public goods grants. First, we sought to expand the number of great minds to help us on our mission and to build the foundation of the wider Otterspace community with a formidable crew of co-owners. Second, we wanted to enable the team to focus on building a solid foundation for the protocol. We consider ourselves lucky to have brought on investors that are values- and mission-aligned, act as sounding boards to our day-to-day challenges, and are in it for the long haul through the bear market.

With support from our investors, partners, and the wider community, our team is focused on building a robust, secure, and easy-to-use infrastructure allowing DAOs to create, issue and revoke Badges for their members. Composability is key, and we are collaborating with other DAO tools including Safe, Snapshot, Guild and Sobol to bring utility to Badges. The open-source protocol is an un-opinionated tool that can be used in a myriad of ways, and we have seen 4 powerful use cases emerge: reputation & governance, engagement & gamification, membership & permissions and credentials & education.

Badges are a powerful governance tool and can be used by DAOs to distribute influence to stakeholders whose interests are non-financial. For example, we are working with Radicle DAO to use Badges to identify project contributors based on their role and tenure. Governance influence is distributed to these Badge holders, as they are high-context participants with low allocations of the DAO token.

The Otterspace-Snapshot integration can be leveraged to grant governance power to holders of specific Badges, in addition to or instead of a fungible token. Communities can select the Badges they want to use in governance and decide how much voting power to allocate to each one. This also allows communities to distribute governance to members of committees/teams by creating a sub-space in Snapshot and allowing only members of that committee to participate in governance. For example, an Engineering Team Snapshot sub-space can be set up for Engineering Team Badge Holders.

Badges can also be used to ensure compliance and carry out Sybil-resistant governance by using the Otterspace SafeSend integration to issue ‘KYC-passed’ Badges without exposing the contents of the checks or the identity of the member. Those Badges can then be incorporated into rules around governance or access permissions.

In addition to governance, Badges support engagement within communities by acting as non-financial rewards to recognize users for their participation. Taking inspiration from video games, where players collect Soulbound items for completing quests, communities can use Badges to reward participation along different membership paths. The MetaStreet community, for example, has multiple levels that members need to complete to earn Badges and get perks. This builds contribution paths and incentivizes member participation by rewarding loyalty.

Token-gating is one of the earliest and most-common utilities of tokens in communities, but Badges can be used to take this to a new level. Badges allow communities to enumerate more complex team roles such as guild coordinator, guild member, or project lead. These Badges can then be used to manage access permissions to spaces, content, and actions like merging code. The Bankless DAO is using Otterspace to build exactly this; season 6 participants and level 2 role holders will be issued Badges that grant access to Discord roles.

Lastly, we want to mention the value of Badges as educational credentials. Web3 native online learning communities are able to issue Badges upon completion of a course or certification, and individuals can then display these achievements as part of their Web3 identity for other projects or people to assess their skills. Token Engineering Academy is using Badges for their new TE Fundamentals course, where they automatically issue Badge vouchers to students who complete the curriculum. Students are then able to mint their Badges and display them in the TE dashboard. By integrating directly with the Otterspace protocol, TE Academy can provide its students with a seamless experience.

One final note: while there are many vertical use cases for Badges in communities, the meta-utility is the ability to stitch together someone’s history, experience, skills, social capital, interests and roles based on their Badge collection. We look forward to seeing how different applications use this primitive to build new experiences.

In case you’re seeing dystopian visions, rest easy that the Otterspace protocol only enables consented Badge issuance – it is impossible for anyone to use the protocol to send someone an unconsented Badge. In addition, the protocol is designed to allow communities to choose their preferred level of decentralization by setting community-level permissions on how Badges are created, issued, and revoked. We consider Otterspace Badges to be a core coordination primitive in Web3 and are thoughtfully and carefully designing the protocol with this in mind.

While Otterspace is currently operating as a small team out of Berlin, we are committed to the path of progressive decentralization and count ourselves lucky to have a raft of investors that are on-board this expedition with us. We are slowly and organically growing our community and crew, so follow us on Twitter and sign up for our Beta if our mission calls to you.

Introducing the Pioneer Otternaut crew…

Sign up here to start using badges in your DAO.

Badges are non-transferable tokens based on the new EIP4973 standard. They are earned, not bought, and can be used by your community to represent membership, achievements, roles, levels, skills, participation or pretty much anything else you can think of.

Badges allow you to build a more nuanced membership model, non-financial governance and better incentives.

Within the Otterspace Protocol, you can create badges for your community and add members to the mint list to claim their badge. The Otterspace app is designed with a non-expert user in mind, and offers a simple experience for creating and claiming badges. Transactions are super fast and cheap because the protocol is deployed on Optimism.

⚡️ Otterspace badges can already be used in Snapshot strategies, so you can build non-financial governance from the get-go. You can use weights to give holders of different badges varying levels of governance power. Holders of the core contributor badge could have more weighted governance power than holders of the member badge, for example.

The fear of non-transferable tokens is real, but we’ve addressed concerns around consent within the deepest layers of the protocol. Otter badges can never be airdropped to accounts - members claim badges after being issued a voucher.

Coming up, you’ll be seeing a bunch of new integrations including Guild and Gnosis Safe, as well as continued improvements in how we handle badge expiry, protocol permissions and the claiming user experience.

Follow us on Twitter to stay tuned for more product updates.

In the last part of our story, the Otternauts discovered The Badge.

The Otter Badges are used to represent affiliation with a planet, give governance over the planet and recognize the achievement of extraordinary Otternauts. As Otternauts collect the badges and tuck them in their fur, they can show other Otters who they are and access the interplanetary rafts. Moloch doesn’t stand a chance against this level of coordination.

As the coordination among the Otternauts improves, their societies flourish and become healthy ecosystems composed of rafts floating through the Otterverse. The motto of the Otternauts is ‘flow over control’. To encourage other communities, they decided to share the secret of how they use badges.

The hyperfinancialization of Web3 has seen plutocratic governance, a culture of meme-driven speculation and roaring bull runs. Non-transferable (and therefore non-financial) tokens offer a promising path for communities built less around money and speculation. But how can this new type of token, sometimes called an SBT or ‘Soulbound’ token be applied within DAOs and other Web3 communities?

At Otterspace, we’re working on a token standard, protocol and app that enables any community to harness the power of SBTs, or what we call ‘badges’. It has been a while since we posted a product update, so we thought we would use this opportunity to introduce some of the ways communities can use badges with Otterspace.

Issuing badges

Communities are at the heart of Otterspace - every badge generated by the protocol is associated with and issued by a community. Within communities, badge design is customizable - a badge is simply an EIP4973 NFT (backwards compatible to ERC721) with a name, artwork and optional expiration date. To issue badges, the community adds members to an allow list. This ensures that badges are never non-consensually airdropped to wallets. Minting costs are exceptionally low, as the protocol is deployed to Optimism.

Badges for membership

One way badges can add a lot of value to communities is to represent membership. When the Otternauts first set up a new community, they created the Otter Badge and give it out to all members. This is a great way to start a decentralized community without having any financial component at all.

Instead of defining community membership by ownership of an ERC20 token, communities are based on holding a specific badge. Individuals can be invited to join the community without being able to transfer their membership to someone else.

Another benefit of using badges for membership is that communities can create a more nuanced membership model. The Otternauts created a Level 1 Otter Pup, Level 2 Sea Otter and Level 3 Alpha Otter badge, for example. The community also has a ‘Visitotter Badge’ which expires after 7 days and allows guests to temporarily become members. Newly onboarding members receive the Otter Pup badge for completing their onboarding requirements, and then have to prove their further commitment to reach Sea Otter status. With the Otterspace missions app (coming soon), you can issue badges for completion of onboarding tasks and on-chain requirements.

Community membership is not just defined by how deeply integrated someone is into a community, but also by what role they hold. Badges can be used to represent roles like “Sea Urchin Hunter” or “Rock Juggler”. These badges could have an expiry date to represent the agreed-upon length of the role.

Badges are powerful membership tools compared with ERC20s - a fungible token allows you to distinguish individuals only by the number of tokens they hold. By using badges, the complex nature of membership can be captured on-chain and displayed in members’ wallets.

Badges for community engagement

Badges are not just membership NFTs, but can also be used for fun and engagement in the community. The Otternauts have the Batman Badge, which is given to a community hero who goes above and beyond 🦸.

Badges can be used to represent one-off awards, but also event participation, project participation, work completion or anything else you can imagine. Anytime you want to recognize an individual, you can use a badge. Because the Otterspace badges are on Optimism, the cost of claiming a badge is in the order of cents.

Earning non-transferable badges by engaging in a community is similar to collecting Soulbound items in a video game to level-up your avatar. Badges can not only be used as incidental ‘rewards’ for engagement, but also to chart participation paths.

With Otterspace Missions, badges can be awarded to members permissionlessly based on a predefined set of criteria. One criterion for earning a badge can be the ownership of another badge - this creates paths or journeys in the community. For example, you might need to earn the ‘EngineerOtter Level 1’ badge before you can work towards getting the ‘EngineerOtter Level 2’ badge. Badges can be earned along a journey as a member goes from being a rookie to a core contributor.

Another way to engage the community is to recognise early adoption or event participation. We’ve seen POAPs being used to gain clout for attendance of events or “being early”. Badges allow this social capital to be non-tradable and therefore a more reliable signal. If someone can buy your POAP collection, it is no longer a trustworthy sign of clout.

With the financialized tools of Web3, it’s easy to forget that social capital is often more of a reward to community members than money. Badges can be a powerful tool to incentivize participation. Instead of paying ‘tips’ to members for joining their first community call for example, they could be given a badge to show off in their wallet.

One benefit of the wild NFT craze of last year has been that digital collectibles have reached cultural adoption. Non-transferable digital collectibles are even more desirable because they can’t simply be bought by the wealthy. Introducing them into your community is a powerful way to reward and incentivize members for their engagement.

Badge utility

The beauty of putting badges on-chain is that they can have boundless utility. Unlike scout patches which are just worn on clothing to signal affiliation and reputation, Otterspace badges can do this and more. Now that your community has a bunch of badges for membership, roles, events and achievements, what’s next?

Otterspace badges can be used for governance, access permissions, salary payment, staking reputation, token-gated commerce, undercollateralized lending, retroactive airdrops and pretty much anything else you can think of that requires an on-chain record.

Using badges for governance is a powerful way to address the limitations of coin voting while maintaining sybil resistance. Reviewing the entire badge collection of an individual can be a reliable signal that they are in fact a unique human without having to carry out KYC or proof of personhood checks.

While sybil resistance is certainly an important benefit, the power of badges for governance doesn’t end there. Because badges represent the nuanced nature of membership, they can be used to give individuals varying degrees of influence or decision scope. For example, the Otternauts have granted holders of Rock Juggler badges decision scope over Rock Guild decisions. Perhaps Expert Rock Jugglers have 20% more governance weight than Rookie Rock Jugglers. Using badges as your membership primitive allows you to generate far more complex governance structures than you could do with a fungible token.

Another common utility given to badges is access permissions. Any badge can be programmed as a key to unlock any door in Web3 (or Web2 with the right tools). DAOs that use Web3 native tools like Clarity, Wonder or Radicle can set permissions via badges. For example, Wonder could be set-up so that only Expert Sea Urchin Hunters can pick up sea urchin-related bounties. Discord roles can also be configured to correspond to badges, so any time someone earns a level-up badge, they are automatically given a new role on Discord.

We know there are many more kinds of badge utility that we haven’t thought of yet. By building the Otterspace Protocol as a composable primitive and toolset, we invite developers to integrate new tools and build custom use cases. We’re excited to see all the ways the Otterspace building blocks are used.

To start using SBTs in your community with Otterspace, join our waitlist and we’ll reach out about getting you onboarded to our Beta program. If you have any questions or feedback, our Twitter DMs are always open.

Stay tuned for more updates by subscribing to us on Mirror or following us on Twitter.

It’s easy to dismiss the gleeful voices shouting “I told you so”, but engaging in critical discussion is healthy and necessary to progress. The critiques of Web3 range from absurd to moot to genuine and address blockchains, NFTs, cryptocurrencies, the culture and Web3 itself.

One specific problem in Web3 is that of hyperfinancialization. This is particularly interesting because while hyperfinancialization is one of its biggest issues, financialization is an intrinsic benefit of Web3.

The symptoms of hyperfinancialization

The word ‘financialization’ is commonly used to describe the increasing size of a country’s financial sector relative to its whole economy. In Web3, I’m taking it to refer to the value and power placed on financial capital. One of the most glaring symptoms of hyperfinancialization in Web3 is governance plutocracy.

A plutocracy is a society ruled by wealth, one where money = power. One might remark that money is always power,, but within the governance of Web3 projects this relationship couldn’t be more explicit. The prevalent method of decision making in most DAOs is via ‘coin voting’, where one fungible token = one vote. Money literally is power in this method of governance.

Coin voting is often defended by pointing out that the biggest token holders have the greatest interest in a project succeeding, and should therefore have more influence over it. However, this way of thinking misses an important point: an individual actor’s interest in a project is not just determined by their ownership share of the project itself, but also the size of the investment relative to their whole portfolio. An investor may be the biggest token holder in a specific project, but this investment could be the smallest one in their portfolio. 

One outcome of this form of governance is that financial interest is valued over any other interest. The values and interests of stakeholder groups like DAO workers and users are underrepresented relative to investors. As a result, proposals may skew towards decisions directly impacting financial value, at the expense of those impacting other community values.

One response to these challenges has been to distribute tokens to stakeholders who didn’t buy their way in. We’ve seen this play out with airdrops, where tokens are retroactively distributed to protocol users and contributors as a way of sharing financial upside and voting power. Additionally, active protocol contributors are able to earn tokens as payment for contribution via bounties or part-time work.

As Li Jin put it “A core philosophical tenet of web3 is that there are more ways to provide value to an ecosystem than through capital — and furthermore, that value should be able to be earned, not just purchased”.

Despite community token allocations, the distribution of tokens remains very uneven in most projects. Taking the example of Uniswap, which is the top DAO coin by market cap - a small number of employees and investors hold 40% of Uniswap tokens, giving them outsized power in governance decisions.

In a recent proposal in Lido DAO on the topic of treasury diversification the impact of whales in coin voting was shown on full display. The outcome of the vote was effectively determined by the votes of two whales owning 17M and 15M LDO each (combined they made up 49% of the vote).

There have also been prominent discussions around a recent MakerDAO governance proposal that saw criticism because of the power of a few VC firms to sway the outcome of the vote.

Definancializing Web3 Governance

Hyperfinancialization is not intrinsic to Web3, and is a solvable problem. While coin voting is common practice, it is not the only way to distribute influence to project stakeholders. The beauty of voting via rules written in code is that we can make them custom and complex such that they balance various needs and objectives.

Quadratic voting is one way of increasing the influence of small token holders. This voting mechanism allows individuals to use additional votes to indicate how much they care about an issue. Individuals’ aggregate number of votes is tied to the ownership stake in the organization, but by spending multiple votes they can increase their relative influence over the issue. 

Using additional votes gets increasingly more expensive, so this mechanism is vulnerable to a Sybil attack, whereby an individual uses several wallets to vote multiple times. The first vote on each wallet is cheap, so this mechanism gets you more influence at a cheaper price than casting 4 votes from one wallet.

A more Sybil-resistant way to address governance plutocracy is to introduce a non-financial governance token. In order for a token to be non-financial, it needs to be non-tradable (aka non-transferable or soulbound). This is because governance tokens that can exchange hands will be sold to the highest bidder. Soulbound tokens offer more possibilities for Sybil resistance because a collection of diverse SBTs based on contribution history can be used as a reliable indicator that an individual is a unique human.

The beauty of non-financial governance tokens is that they can be distributed in any manner of ways. There remains a high degree of flexibility and customization, so projects are able to create governance systems that reflect the complexities of their communities.

“Transferable tokens held for some period could unlock the right to SBTs that confer further governance rights over a protocol. SBTs open a rich possibility space to experiment with mechanisms that maximize community engagement and other goals.” (Weyl, Ohlhaver, Buterin)

One straightforward way that a community might employ soulbound tokens for governance is to distribute one token to each unique individual participating in a project. Tools such as Proof Of Humanity and BrightID can be used to verify the uniqueness of individuals before they are allocated a governance token. Offline cooperatives and countries have long used the principle of 1 person = 1 vote to ensure that the interests of individuals are protected. With soulbound tokens, this method of governance becomes accessible to Web3.

Soulbound tokens can also be used to generate a complex governance model that takes multiple inputs into account. There might be different kinds of governance tokens with varying weights granted based on depth of protocol participation, for example. Alternatively, there might be different governance tokens for each stakeholder group, with each token having the scope over a particular set of decisions.

Using non-transferable tokens for governance doesn’t have to come at the exclusion of traditional ERC-20 coin voting. Optimism has recently established a two-chamber governance system whereby OP (transferable) token holders control the ‘Token House’ and holders of the non-transferable Citizenship tokens govern the ‘Citizens House’. This is an interesting experiment and will likely provide valuable insights for new organizations designing their voting system (such as Lido, which is exploring bicameralism as well).

Soulbound tokens are one of the key mechanisms with which we can start to definancialize Web3 and introduce more nuance into governance. While there has been a lot of criticism of SBTs in recent months, the challenges raised are addressable. Before throwing the baby out with the bathwater, it is important to remember that SBTs will be a key tool in the next generation of sybil-resistant and non-financialized governance.

At Otterspace, we believe that the future of Web3 is less financialized, and that non-transferable tokens are an important piece of infrastructure to make this future possible. We’re building a protocol and app to leverage the power of badges - join the Otterspace waitlist to start using non-transferable tokens in your community governance.

Subscribe on Mirror and Twitter to stay tuned for new releases.

Shrey Jain

@shreydiwjain

Soulbound Tokens have create a lot of discussion on Twitter. I am aggregating all the posts in this thread.

Please comment any posts that feel important to you.
x.com/VitalikButerin…

vitalik.eth

@VitalikButerin

Re: non-financial blockchain use cases.

42

12:48 AM • Jun 9, 2022

As one of the projects contributing to a non-transferable token standard since before the publication of the DeSoc article, we want to join the discussion by clearing up some misconceptions and explaining why we have chosen non-transferable NFTs for the Otterspace DAO badges. For more background on the problem we are solving with the Otterspace protocol, check out this article.

“What the heck are soulbound tokens? Even after reading the paper, I still don’t know” - Kate Sills

The misconceptions with soulbound tokens start with the fact that they are not a clearly defined thing, but a collection of ideas tied to a highly expressive term that invites people to imagine and interpret. The term ‘soulbound’ is itself problematic, as it conjures images of permanently tying some fact or object to the deepest places in your being.

Puja Ohlhaver

@pujaohlhaver

Wonder if we could have eschewed semantic arguments by using “community bound tokens” (CBTs) instead “soulbound tokens” (SBTs)?

CBTs better captures the starting point—communities—-and scale of n stakeholders, naturally differentiating from self-sovereign VCs & DiDs.

76

5:09 AM • May 30, 2022

Discussing a specific token standard, protocol and use case allows us to have a more concrete conversation about the risks and utility to the community. In part 1, I’ll dive into some misconceptions around the non-transferable token standard we’re working on at Otterspace, and in part 2, I’ll explain why we chose to use an NFT for the Otterspace badges.

Part 1 - Misconceptions around non-transferable tokens

First scary thing: permanence and lack of consent

Thomas Jay Rush

@tjayrush

Soul bound tokens scare the shit out of me.

If institutions can 'mint' credentials that I can't transfer, what happens when my government issues a credential saying I attended protest march A.

And what saves me when "attending protest march A" becomes retroactively illegal?

216

6:42 AM • May 20, 2022

One common critique we’ve heard of non-transferable tokens is that they can be used to non-consensually and permanently tie public information to your account. For example, someone could doxx me by dropping an SBT with my home address to my account. The difference between SBTs and ERC-721 NFTs is that with a 721 I can transfer that token out of the account after someone airdrops it to me and with an SBT I can’t.

The protocol we’re working on alleviates this concern in two ways: tokens can be burned by the holder and they cannot be airdropped. By enabling burnability of the tokens, the account holder is able to disassociate themselves from the token and any information held within. Burning a non-transferable token has the same effect as transferring an ERC-721 - the history of the token in the wallet is still available on-chain, but the token itself can be disassociated from the account. 

We recently added a ‘mint with permission’ function to the Otterspace protocol. This ensures that the tokens are never airdropped to accounts, but only minted (‘claimed’) by the ultimate holder with permission from the issuer. In practice this means that we have better protection against non-consensual airdropping than the widely used ERC-721 standard.

Privacy concerns are a moot point since the token holder has themselves minted the token and its associated information publicly to their wallet. The Otterspace protocol is designed to serve communities in the context of issuing public badges similar to scout badges, medals and in-game awards. In this context, publicity is a feature, not a bug.

Second scary thing: key rotation

Any long-term user of blockchains knows that regularly changing your account is important to maintain security. A common critique of SBTs is that since they are non-transferable, they make it impossible for users to start using a new account, or recover their tokens if their account is hacked.

It is indeed true that one of the key features of the token is that it does not include the ‘transfer from’ and ‘transfer to’ functions contained in ERC-721s. Without these functions, the tokens cannot be freely traded, and marketplaces like OpenSea are able to recognise them as a different kind of object than a digital work of art, for example. Without tradeability, the tokens can be used as a reliable signal of information about an individual.

“... because NFTs are tradeable items, another big part of the answer inevitably becomes that NFTs are about signaling wealth. If someone shows you that they have an NFT that is obtainable by doing X, you can't tell whether they did X themselves or whether they just paid someone else to do X.” (Buterin, Jan 2022)

Removing the transfer functions from the primitive does not make reassignment of tokens between wallets impossible. The process of verifying and executing a legitimate transfer is not defined in the standard, but is left open to the implementer to design for their use case. In the case of the Otterspace protocol, we are experimenting with community and social verification to manage the token reassignment process, for example. This allows communities using Otterspace to maintain the integrity of the token collection while supporting key rotation and recovery.

Why do we even need a new standard?

In the next section we’ll discuss the Otterspace protocol use case and why we’ve chosen to work with a non-transferable NFT instead of a different tool like a verifiable credential. But assuming non-transferable NFTs are in fact useful, why create a new standard instead of simply modifying the existing standards by removing transfer functions?

By creating a new standard, we enable wallets and dApps to recognize the fact that these tokens are fundamentally different from tradeable NFTs which may be bought and sold on marketplaces and airdropped to friends. As a result, the tokens can be displayed appropriately by applications. 

Removing the transfer function from an ERC-721 token means that interfaces assume transfer is possible - when transfer is attempted, it simply fails. This is a hack and not an acceptable user experience.

Part 2 - Choosing non-transferable NFTs for DAO badges

The Otterspace protocol makes it easy for DAOs to issue badges to members for a wide variety of use cases. The most common ones we have seen are: DAO or guild membership, role, level, awards, completion of tasks, tenure and event participation. You can check out the full story of the problems we are solving and why the model of badges is useful in our blog posts here (part 1) (part 2).

What are badges

In order to delve into why we have chosen non-transferable NFTs for the Otterspace badges, we first need to understand what badges are and what problems they need to solve.

Communities and societies have used badges to represent achievement, reputation, affiliation and recognition for centuries in the form of tattoos, coats of arms, military awards, scout badges, laptop stickers, trophies etc. If we look at the history of badges, we can distill some common themes:

• Badges are earned, not bought.

• Badges are granted by and associated with an organization.

• Badges are simple – objects with a name.

• What gives a badge meaning is the granting organization and circumstances under which it is granted.

• Reputation is not explicit, but implicit through the process of attaining the badge.

• Badges are often worn or displayed by the holder as a social signal.

Badges need to be public

We decided that Otterspace Badges should be public by default, as one important purpose is for the holder to signal affiliation, status and reputation. We can see this behavior play out in several real-world examples.

Scouts proudly wear the badges they have collected and earned on their jackets or sashes in order to signal their affiliation, identity and status. In the context of web3, individuals collect POAPs as a way to signal their status in the community by showing the history of conferences and events they have attended. In Discord communities, members use roles to indicate their level in the community.

By putting badges on-chain as NFTs, individuals can showcase them in their wallets as a collection of digital trophies, affiliations and achievements. In the Otterspace protocol, each badge is associated with the organization that issued it, and voluntarily claimed (minted) by the eligible individual.

Badges need to be interoperable with dApps

One of the biggest advantages to using NFTs for the Otterspace Badges is that they become immediately interoperable - easy to integrate - with other dApps. Tokens are already an accepted model for governance, access and membership. 

By making badges tokens, DAOs can easily use them in their Snapshot governance strategies, enable token-gating via existing apps like Guild.xyz and Collab.land, and devolve powers and permissions to holders of badges. By using tokens, we take advantage of the composable nature of web3 and enable quick integrations to expand the range of user experiences. 

A related advantage of keeping badges on-chain is that they can be issued without permission based on on-chain data. This is a use-case DAOs are particularly interested in, as it would enable them to create an objective set of on-chain requirements for earning a badge, and enable DAO members to mint themselves a badge once they meet those requirements.

A note on affordability and convenience

One of the arguments for keeping badges off-chain is the cost of minting each badge. With the improvements afforded by L2s and Optimistic rollups, we are confident that affordability will not present a barrier to adoption. As Vitalik Buterin mentioned in his recent article, sometimes blockchains are just a really convenient place to store stuff.

vitalik.eth

@VitalikButerin

Re: non-financial blockchain use cases.

6,675

2:25 PM • May 27, 2022

🔰🔰🔰

It’s an exciting time to be working in web3 as we’re experiencing this shift towards applications less driven by profit and speculation. At Otterspace, we believe in the potential of DAOs to make the next generation of the internet community-owned and governed. Through our work with DAOs we have learned that badges are an important missing cornerstone, and are excited to bring these to life via non-transferable tokens. 

We hope this article has quashed some concerns around non-transferable tokens and shed light on the potential this technology affords. We’re keen to keep healthy discussion going so we can improve the design of standards and protocols to make them abuse-resistant. 

Follow us on Twitter to join the conversation! 🦦🚀

Much has been written about DAOs as a new form of organization, and how they can be built and maintained sustainably. We are very much still in the iteration and discovery phase as we learn how DAOs can best structure, govern, attract and retain members and produce value. However, it is not too early to start thinking about the implication of DAOs as a new organizational structure.

As DAOs adopt new forms of operation, this will affect how they collaborate with, sell and service each other and other organizations. This blog post tells the story of what we have learned about DAO go-to-market (GTM) as a young, small organization building primitives for DAOs.

Starting with the wrong heuristics

In his post on the DAO landscape, Coopahtroopa defined DAOs and segmented them by industry. This is an obvious starting point in trying to make sense of DAOs and forming a high-level view of the space. However, stopping the segmentation at this level misses an important point: there are many other properties that make DAOs different from one another. As a DAO tooling builder, we learned that these other properties were more relevant in defining which DAOs we worked with.

DAOs are fundamentally different from traditional organizations, both in their mode of operation and culture. Their fluid nature, positive-sum culture, and distributed decision-making set them apart, but also introduce attributes that make DAOs very different from one another. Simply starting from the comparison point between DAOs and ‘organizations’ may lead us down the wrong path. We might instead start from a framework that compares DAOs to ecologies or sense-making organisms – networks of interdependent actors.

This connects with a broader theme we are noticing in web3 – the use of assumptions and heuristics from the past often leads us to miss the point. In order to effectively build for, collaborate with and sell to DAOs, we need to shed our assumptions and go back to the basic questions. In the case of GTM, this means building segmentation from the ground up, understanding organizational decision-making, and embracing DAOs for what they are.

Why it’s hard

Before we dive in, it’s worth mentioning what we have found makes DAO GTM hard:

1. Using the wrong heuristics for what DAOs actually are. Using the wrong heuristics misses the point of embracing DAOs for what they are and introduces analogies from the traditional world, which oftentimes don’t work. First-principles thinking is required in coming up with an effective strategy.

2. DAOs are in a constant state of flux. DAOs are nascent and crypto is moving fast. Since many DAOs are still figuring out their ideal operating method, they are evolving at a fast pace, which often means that pressing problems from last month may not be the top priority this month.

3. DAOs are not entities with single points of contact, but rather sense-making organisms that coordinate as a network of people. The lack of defined hierarchy, decision-making, and responsibility means that there are many different voices, opinions, and agendas. While we find this a compelling feature of DAOs, it also makes GTM hard to navigate if you’re approaching it like traditional sales.

4. Nobody, including DAOs, fully knows what they need. Since we are all still figuring this out together, there is no one clear menu of what DAOs need. It is harder to build and sell products when there is so much uncertainty about the needs and priorities.

5. DAOs are early. The fact that DAOs are early and many are still experiments (totally worth making), means that most DAOs that exist today probably won’t be around for the long haul. The DAOs that stick around will be overwhelmed with requests for new DAO tooling, as all DAO tooling builders are focused on the same high-profile DAOs.

Tactics that worked for Otterspace

With the challenges laid out above, finding an effective way to navigate the beautiful messiness in the space can present itself as an opportunity to differentiate and find success. Below are some strategies that have helped us – maybe they will also help you.

1. Forego inaccurate heuristics by segmenting effectively

Effectively segmenting DAOs for your specific case is essential both for product development and GTM. Understanding who you are building for will help you stay focused and hone in on depth over breadth. We have found that starting with the problem is the most effective way to build good segmentation. Ask yourself what types of DAOs are likely to feel the problem most painfully and why?

Some of the properties we have considered and found helpful in segmentation are:

• Lifecycle stage (newly forming vs. mature DAOs)

• Treasury size

• Member size

• Contributor size

• On-chain maximalists or not

• Number of contributors

• DAO mission & purpose (product, service, community)

In addition to considering what properties are relevant to your problem, it also helps to consider the properties that will make your DAOs a good customer. How are they funded? Are they likely to become long-term users? Will they refer other DAOs? Asking this question led us to a cluster-based segmentation of DAOs, mapping out loosely affiliated groups of DAOs with strong ties amongst contributor networks. These are entirely subjective clusters, but they may help you too:

• Public goods cluster (Gitcoin, ENS, Proof of Humanity, Toucan Protocol, Gnosis, etc.)

• DeFi Maxis (Compound, Curve, Uniswap, Aave, etc.)

• Social Finance (Index Coop, Bankless, etc.)

• On-chain Maxis (DxDAO, etc.)

• Moloch (DAO Haus, MetaCartel, etc.)

• “Community is the product” DAOs (Forefront, FWB, SeedClub, etc.)

• Juicebox cluster (SharkDAO, ConstitutionDAO, MoonDAO, etc.)

• NFT Cluster (NOUNS DAO, PartyDAO, FlamingDAO, ApeDAO, etc.)

2. Accept the fast-paced evolution of DAOs and build an adaptable product

DAOs are constantly learning, evolving, and updating their methods of operation. If you need to spend 6 months to put something in the hands of your customer, you might miss the boat as the DAO evolves beyond last year’s issues. GTM always starts with having the right product, but in this case, it couldn’t be more important.

The evolving nature of DAOs favors straightforward products that solve specific and highly painful problems. By overengineering or overdesigning a solution, you risk building in assumptions or needs that quickly become irrelevant or take too long to build.

As we have iterated on the Otterspace product from MVP onwards, we learned that stripping away functionality would allow us to start with a simpler product and evolve with the DAOs using our solution. Keeping products focused and simple is not a new concept, but we have found it especially important in the DAO space which is evolving so quickly.

3. Leverage the networked nature of DAOs by building a self-serve product with built-in growth loops

Lean into the permissionless nature of DAOs by building self-serve and single-player use cases that foster bottom-up adoption within the DAO, instead of trying to sell to the DAO as a whole. If you are building a product that is valuable in multiplayer mode, focus on DAO sub-units such as guilds or pods instead of going for DAO-wide adoption.

By considering the DAO as an organism or network, you can seed small projects within a DAO and let them percolate upwards through built-in growth loops, thereby spreading adoption. This takes advantage of the bottom-up and permissionless nature of DAOs and reduces the amount of direct sales work needed.

At Otterspace, we started by serving only onboarding member journeys with the intention of expanding to other journeys later. However, we quickly realized that the onboarding journey relies on many more stakeholders and is more time-consuming to implement. By allowing any DAO member to create any journey, we make product adoption easier by individuals and guilds. The natural growth loops built into our badges product allow easy adoption – once someone earns a badge they can go and create a badge for someone else.

4. Collaborate with other projects to collectively figure out what DAOs need

We are all early and nobody is quite sure what DAOs need or how they will continue to evolve. In order to have the highest chance of success, we all need to put our heads together, learn from each other and build flexible, interoperable tools.

The beauty of web3 is the ability to build modular and easily composable components that form part of a greater whole. By collaborating with adjacent projects, you can together build an even greater solution and benefit from increased distribution. Similar to how we framed DAOs as ecologies, we can also consider DAO tools to be an ecosystem of components that can symbiotically work together to enable DAOs to compose their ideal whole.

It also goes without saying that the values of positive-sum, open-source, and minimal extraction are deeply rooted in the DAO culture and you will most likely fail if you try to sell DAOs something that is centralized, siloed in a walled garden, and extractive.

At Otterspace, we’ve been bringing together a group of leading DAO tooling projects to collaborate in a symbiotic way. We believe that together, we’re more likely to be able to learn and build a better tool stack for DAOs. Stay tuned for the DAO-in-a-box piece, which is coming out soon!

5. Amplify and differentiate your message to DAOs by building out your community

Try to build a community as early as possible. Your community will help you prequalify potential DAOs who want to try your product and act as the top of funnel that drives awareness about your product and the problem that you’re addressing. It will also support the middle of funnel in teaching users how to use the product during the consideration stage. Most importantly, your community also acts as the unified megaphone that will amplify your differentiated message. This is important in becoming the signal in all the noise.

At Otterspace, we realized early on that quality over quantity is what makes an engaging community. We, therefore, decided to curate our community based on the Otter NFT campaign which launched in February. We wanted to make sure that everyone who joins our community resonates with our mission and vision, and is incentivized to spread our message.

Since we will plan on launching our product publicly, we will open up our community with that as well. Stay tuned for our public launch soon!

What’s next

While we certainly don’t have a silver bullet for every problem, we hope our approach to solving some of the GTM challenges will also help other DAOs and DAO tooling providers. By publishing this piece, we hope to engage in public discourse on what works and what doesn’t. Please reach out on Twitter to contribute to the public discussion on this!

In Part I, we told the story of the Otterverse coming under attack from Moloch as more and more Otters floated in and coordination became harder. The rocks ($ROC) the Otters use as a currency for ownership and governance were not good enough for running the Otter planets. In part II, we tell the story of how the Otters discovered a new model for organizing the Otterverse.

Otters are clever and curious creatures who do their own research. As they review human history for clues, they stumble upon The Badge…

Evolution of badges

Badges have been used in many forms throughout human history to recognize achievements, demonstrate community affiliation and display social status. We can consider the badge an atomic social unit that is itself simple, but carries a great deal of meaning. A quick survey of the use of badges throughout history illustrates this simple but powerful concept.

12th Century - Coat of Arms

The coat of arms takes us back to 12th Century Europe, where organizations (families, corporations, states, schools) and individuals represented heraldic achievement in a visual composition including a motto, supporters, crest and shield. Individual knights bore a coat of arms to signal their rank and affiliation. The system was used as a visual representation of rank and pedigree in society, and some countries like England even had entities in control of granting arms to organizations.

17th Century - Military

The military have been using badges to recognize achievements and qualifications since the 17th Century, with some badges being awarded for exceptional conduct – such as the British Victoria Cross, and others being purely used for identification – such as the US Army Military Horseman badge. Similar to the coat of arms, the badge is a simple object with all its meaning coming from who granted it and the circumstances under which it was granted.

20th Century - Scout badges

The scout movement was started in England in the early 20th century by an Army General who most probably drew inspiration from the military in the use of a uniform with badges. Since then, scout badges have grown into a world of their own, being used to represent group affiliation, progressive awards, proficiency awards and event participation. Individuals sew the badges onto their uniform in order to display their achievements and affiliations.

21st Century - MMORPGs

The rise of massively multiplayer online games was marked by the success of World of Warcraft, first released in 2004. The game is based on players adopting an avatar to interact in the virtual world, completing quests and engaging in combat to earn experience points and level-up their character in the game. Players earn costumes, titles, objects, skills, XP and gold which accrue to their avatar and form the basis of their perceived reputation in the game. One big challenge with World of Warcraft and other MMORPGs has been the selling of in-game currency and entire accounts, undermining the reputation system.

Twitter blue checkmark - 21 C

Twitter’s blue checkmark is an example of a badge granted by a Web2 organization to attest that an account of public interest is authentic. While initially used as a tool for content moderation and curation, the blue checkmark has become a symbol of social status and reputation, as it is only granted to ‘notable’ accounts.

The history of badges teaches us several important attributes:

• Badges are earned, never bought

• Badges are granted by and associated with an organization

• Badges are simple – at face value they are a set of identical physical objects with a name

• What gives a badge meaning is the granting organization and circumstances under which it is granted

• Reputation is not explicit, but implicit through the process of attaining the badge

DAOs and the Otter Badges

Since their rise, we have observed many DAOs struggling with:

1. Limited ways to break down membership

2. Financialized rewards for contribution

3. Reputation and identity of individuals is not persisted

4. Reliance on manual human intervention and judgment

5. Token voting ineffectively balances incentives between stakeholders

To read the full break-down of the problems we are addressing with the badges, check out Part I of this blogpost series.

In order to bring more order and recognition into their communities, we have observed DAOs using levels, roles and guilds to break down community membership into more granular units, and recognizing achievements and event attendance via POAPs.

The badge model suits these types of organizations because without a centralized, hierarchical decision-making machine, individuals need to carry their reputation and affiliations with them. Badges allow DAOs to represent community and sub-community affiliation, community progression, achievement, event participation and skill acquisition.

Within the Otter Protocol, badges are a non-tradeable NFT issued by a community, used to grant power and permissions and displayed to show reputation, history, experience, social capital and standing in the community.

The Otters found what they were looking for – a way to give Otters a sense of identity, reward achievements, enable autonomy and fight the whales. The Otter Badge was born. The Otters decided to craft badges from pearl oyster shells and meteorites and give them unique names, but they needed to figure out how to grant badges to Otternauts.

The Otter Badges

The Otter Badges are based on an open set of Ethereum smart contracts that can be used by any DAO. The design of the badge object itself is as un-opinionated as possible, while still retaining enough structure to have meaning. The design is inspired by what we have learned from historical instances of badge systems, as well as hours of conversation with leaders at DAOs like ENS, Gitcoin, PrimeDAO, Juicebox, Mirror DAO, Metastreet, LlamaDAO, CabinDAO, Synthetix and DAOHaus.

Actors

There are several types of actors that are relevant to a DAO:

• An individual human member (an Otter)

• A group of individuals acting in concert (a romp of Otters)

  • A squad or sub-DAO

  • The DAO itself

• Benevolent community bots

In the Otter Protocol, any of these agents can hold badges and play a role in creating, distributing, revoking and reassigning badges. Within the protocol, agents are identified by the badges they hold.

While DAOs can be considered agents when acting as a single organism based on a governance vote, we also see them as an important entity in the system. One of the key design decisions we have made is that a badge must be associated with an organization or sub-organization. In this sense, DAOs are both agents and organizations or networks to which other agents and badges can belong.

Badge actions

Designing a badge

An agent designs a badge by creating a schema for the badge, in line with the structure set out by the protocol.

For example, Louie 🦦 the community lead at Otter DAO might design the “Rock holder” badge by providing the required metadata and other parameters. The Rock holder badge then becomes part of Otter DAO’s badge collection and can be minted by DAO members who meet the eligibility requirements.

Badge attestation and proofs

The badge’s proof is the rule-set for the circumstances under which the badge can be minted. Every badge must have a proof associated with it when designed, or else anyone could mint any badge.

Badges must be attested before they are minted. This is the process whereby an agent completes/meets the requirements and another agent or system verifies that the requirements have been met. At the end of this process, a mint voucher is generated.

Importantly, agents with a mint voucher must mint the badge themselves rather than having the badge airdropped. This ensures that all badges are associated with an agent by consent.

Revoking a badge

Badges can be revoked, making them inactive. Inactive badges are still visible and associated with the agent as a record of history. For example, Louie holds the Otter DAO “Alpha Otter” badge, representing that he is the community lead. Unfortunately, he swims off with the DAO’s shrimp budget, and the DAO votes to revoke his badge. The badge itself remains part of Louie’s collection, but is in an inactive state.

Reassigning a badge

The core principle of badges is that they can only be earned, not bought. As such, they should not change hands between agents. There have been multiple proposed design approaches to this problem, including verifiable credentials, but we have chosen to work with a non-transferable NFT. We believe that with the possibility of reassignment, an NFT meets the requirements of this problem.

Badge reassignment happens when an agent loses access to their wallet or wants to change wallets for a different reason. In reassignment, the tokens in one wallet are burned and reassigned to a second wallet.

The badge itself

We view the badge as a primitive that does not assume a specific use case – as such, it is similar to the types of badges we have observed throughout history. We have based the metadata schema on the examples we have observed in the DAOs we’ve worked with.

To learn more about how the badges work under hood, including the metadata, Otter badge schema and the minting process, sign up to the wait list to be the first one in line to try our private Beta.

Downstream of badges 🌊🦦

Badges create an implicit network of agents (badge-holders) who have rights (governance, ownership, access) within an organization (or DAO) by virtue of owning a badge. This network structure is emergent and organic (self-organizing) rather than artificially or arbitrarily pre-defined by leaders.

Various apps can represent the data in this network in different ways, such as an org chart, talent marketplace, or leaderboard. Other apps might want to interpret the data held by the network to calculate skills, reputation, trustworthiness, and other scores.

DAOs can use the ownership of a badge as a requirement for an agent to be able to access spaces (e.g. Discord), knowledge (e.g. Clarity), governance (e.g. Snapshot), tasks (e.g. Wonderverse), Code repos (e.g. Radicle), multisigs (e.g. Gnosis Safe) and compensation (e.g. Utopia Labs or Coordinape).

The Otter Badges are a public good that can be used by DAOs as a foundation for any type of badge system to represent membership, distribute power and recognize contribution. The Otters are still at the early stages of building the Otterverse and welcome all Otternauts with ideas for improvements or collaboration. 🦦🚀

The Otter Badges are used to represent affiliation with a planet, give governance over the planet and recognize the achievement of extraordinary Otternauts. As Otternauts collect the badges and tuck them in their fur, they can show other Otters who they are and access the interplanetary rafts. Moloch doesn’t stand a chance against this level of coordination.

Equipped with a new tool to manage the growth of the Otterverse, the Otters are ready to welcome new Otternauts on board their mission.

Join us by following along on Twitter, or sign-up to the wait list.