The way accounts interact with smart contracts is shaped as much by the affordances of technical infrastructure as by the limitations of execution tooling. For organizations, finance teams, autonomous agents, and individual users, Safe accounts have become foundational to onchain coordination — but execution itself often unfolds through fragmented approvals, repetitive interactions, and limited visibility.

Zodiac Pilot introduces a new pattern: modular, programmable execution for Safe accounts. Instead of juggling approvals across dapps and manually signing each step, users can batch interactions into a single transaction, test entire flows in a web3 sandbox, and execute from a streamlined side panel. When paired with Zodiac Roles, Pilot even lets trusted delegates execute transactions on behalf of the Safe under tightly scoped permissions — all from a simple interface.

Now production-ready, Pilot is already facilitating secure, non-custodial execution for teams managing over $2B in treasuries, including kpk (formerly karpatkey), ENS DAO, Balancer, and GnosisDAO.

Try it now at pilot.gnosisguild.org, or read on for details.

Batch & Execute from A Convenient Side Panel

Smart contract execution has largely been constrained by piecemeal approvals and static, single-function interactions. While Safe accounts have streamlined custody and governance, transactions involving multiple protocols remain slow, repetitive, and costly — and few interfaces fully leverage Safe’s batching capabilities.

Pilot transparently unlocks this batching capability for all apps without imposing compatibility requirements on front-ends. By shifting execution from isolated approvals to modular transaction flows, Pilot lets users batch and execute dynamically — minimizing fragmentation while preserving control.

Group transactions, reduce costs: Combine multiple web3 interactions into a single batch, minimizing gas fees and the number of signatures to be collected.

Seamless and secure multi-dapp execution: Run transactions across Aave, Uniswap, Balancer, and more — no custom integrations, no contract modifications. Approve, execute, revoke, all within an atomic batch transaction. Never lose funds to hacks.

One interface, no extra windows: Pilot’s browser side panel lets users test, modify, and execute transactions without leaving their workflow.

Unlike static execution models, Pilot is modular, context-aware, and built to evolve with onchain activity.

Delegate Programmatically to Any Address

In most execution models, permissioning is binary: either a signer has full control, or they don’t. This structure bottlenecks operational efficiency while exposing teams to unnecessary security risks.

Leveraging Zodiac Roles, Pilot enables precise execution control. Teams can delegate specific actions to trusted roles while ensuring all permissions remain fine-grained, transparent, and programmable.

Streamline repetitive actions with scoped permissions: Reduce blind signing by assigning roles for routine transactions, ensuring secure execution without unnecessary signer fatigue.

Minimize security risks in execution: Enable token swaps, treasury rebalances, and governance actions within predefined limits.

Reduce multisig coordination overhead: Fine-tune access control so teams can batch, delegate, and execute workflows without manual approvals from all multisig owners at every step.

Pilot replaces static, all-or-nothing permission models with dynamic, programmable delegation, keeping Safe accounts efficient and secure.

Simulate First in a Web3 Sandbox

Transaction execution in web3 often operates on blind trust. Once signed, a transaction is irreversible — any misconfiguration, miscalculation, or unexpected dapp behavior can lead to fund loss, governance failures, or wasted gas fees.

Pilot eliminates such uncertainties with simulation forks via Tenderly virtual testnets, creating a risk-free testing environment where users can validate transaction flows before execution.

Prevents costly mistakes: Run pre-execution tests for token swaps, staking, treasury movements, and governance actions before committing onchain.

Introduces a review period for execution logic: Detect and fix errors before executing, ensuring transactions behave as expected.

Maximizes capital efficiency: Explore protocols and test new strategies by running through end-to-end transaction flows without wasting gas or putting funds at risk.

For institutions and finance teams managing high-value transactions, Pilot’s simulation forks ensure execution remains reliable and auditable.

Who Benefits From Pilot?

Pilot is built for any Safe user who needs precise control, modular execution, and high compatibility across web3 applications.

Treasury teams: Reduce gas costs, automate recurring actions, and delegate securely with role-based permissions.📍e.g. An onchain treasury delegates execution to a third party, which uses Pilot to manage assets under tightly scoped rules.

DAO operators: Batch governance proposals, simulate fund flows, and reduce approval overhead.📍e.g. An onchain entity simulates and batches treasury disbursements into a single transaction, saving gas and signer time.

Developers: Build and test multi-protocol workflows without custom contract integrations.📍e.g. A contributor simulates a cross-vault liquidity migration using Pilot’s sandbox.

Individual users: Interact with multiple dapps in fewer clicks — bringing EOA-like UX to Safe accounts.📍e.g. A multisig operator batches a swap, stake, and delegate action into one signature — no excessive tab switching.

Start Using Zodiac Pilot

Pilot moves execution beyond manual approvals and fragmented dapp interactions. With modular batching, programmable permissions, and risk-free testing, it helps teams move faster — and safer — onchain. Learn more:

✈️ Pilot website 📜 Documentation 💻 Developer repo

To learn more about the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord.

Legal disclaimer: This post and the tutorial is for informational purposes only. It may contain errors. It is not a risk assessment, nor investment advice. We take no liability for any losses arising in connection with the information provided or any other action related thereto.

To get started, visit the Roles website and developer repo. To learn more about and participate in the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord.

How an onchain entity moves is in part determined by the interactions of its constituent parts. But how do we ourselves move within an onchain entity?

Perhaps it’s unsurprising that we can draw inspiration not from academia or a thinkpiece, but from one of the most culturally enduring anime of our time, 1995’s Neon Genesis Evangelion.

In the series, humans deploy bio-mechanical units called Evangelions to counter the existential threat of giant entities known as Angels. Each Evangelion can be operated when a chosen pilot immerses themselves in an Entry Plug, a modular, capsule-shaped cockpit that is inserted into an Evangelion’s spine. Access control of each Entry Plug is tailored to the neural impulses of specific pilots, blurring the boundary between the pilot’s role and the Evangelion’s operational system.

If DAOs and other onchain entities could be considered spiritual equivalents to Evangelions, what could serve as their Entry Plug? What kinds of relationships can we establish with our decentralized systems that also transcend the traditional operator-machine dynamic? And how can such specialized access control function across systems in a similarly modular and dynamic way?

Introducing: Zodiac Roles Modifier

Enter Zodiac Roles Modifier, an onchain permissions module for smart accounts. With Roles, onchain entities can extend secure transaction permissions to any address through customizable roles, allowing any account to act on its behalf. Featuring a smart contract that attaches to any Safe, Roles enables onchain entities of all sizes to create any number of roles with granular permissions and assign them to specific addresses, whether to an independent treasury manager, AI agent, or even another Zodiac module.

What makes Roles particularly novel is its hyper compatibility with diverse systems. Utilizing the accompanying Roles Toolkit, which includes a powerful SDK and subgraph, onchain entities can implement nearly any role-based access control pattern on top of nearly any existing onchain system.

This programmatic ability is especially powerful, as access control for most current systems are rudimentary (you can only move an asset if you’re a contract owner or have specific permissions), and more nuanced systems are implemented on a per-contract basis or are static after deployment. Using Roles, any onchain entity can benefit immediately from an access control solution that’s modular and dynamic, resulting in a composable ecosystem of roles and permissions that together orchestrate its movements — a sort of Entry Plug for onchain entities.

The newly revamped Zodiac Roles Modifier evolved from a smart contract originally released in late 2022. Based on feedback from that release, Gnosis Guild completely rewrote the module, applying significant gas optimizations and introducing the most expressive and powerful conditions system for permissioning EVM calls. These new features — including allowances (threshold/rate limits), arbitrary parameter decoding, multiple call variants, and more — greatly enhance its flexibility and customization options, offering onchain entities highly scalable and resilient infrastructure.

Overview

• Zodiac Roles Modifier (v2): A smart contract module (accessible currently through Github and soon through the Zodiac Safe App) that allows onchain entities to create roles with granular permissions and grant them to any address.

• Zodiac Roles Toolkit: An accompanying kit for developers to make building with Roles more powerful and interacting with it simpler.

  • SDK: A TypeScript software development kit to programmatically manage and navigate roles and permissions

  • Subgraph: A specialized querying tool to easily explore roles and permissions associated with any Zodiac Roles Modifier

  Note: Zodiac Roles Modifier is designed to work seamlessly with Zodiac Pilot, a new paradigm in wallet-dapp interaction that allows authorized roles to easily craft multi-send batch transactions on behalf of an onchain entity through a simple interface.

Core Benefits

• Role-Based Access Control: Extends onchain permissions beyond owners/signers, allowing professionals like treasury managers to efficiently manage an org’s critical functions

• Streamlined Transaction Execution: Enables permissioned transactions with clear parameters, eliminating the need for Safe owners/signers to approve every transaction

• Hyper Compatibility: Allows onchain entities to implement nearly any access control pattern on top of nearly any existing onchain system

• Robust Security: Ensures secure transaction environments through meticulous permission scoping and access control safeguards

• Efficient Role Management: Simplifies and streamlines user management tasks and transaction permissions

Key Features

• Create & Assign Roles: Generate custom roles and assign them to any address

• Fine-Tune Permissions: Assign granular permissions to each role, scoping authorized addresses, designated functions, and allowed parameter values through a highly expressive conditions system

• Set Rate and Threshold Limits: Set limits on how frequently a given role or permission can be used, along with thresholds for the scoped parameters granted by a given permission

• Execute Secure Transactions: Authorize role members to perform secure transactions on behalf of the avatar (e.g. a Safe or other compatible smart account)

• Manage Roles & Permissions: Oversee roles and query permissions using the TypeScript SDK and integrated subgraph

Leveraging Zodiac Roles Modifier

Zodiac Roles Modifier has already proven to be critical infrastructure for a number of visionary organizations.

Gnosis Pay, the world's first decentralized payment network, utilizes Roles to increase access control, heighten security, and enhance functionality for its first product, the Visa-powered Gnosis Card. In fact, every single Gnosis Card transaction flows through Roles, enabling the management of fund movement, defining eligible settlement addresses, and enforcing daily transfer limits as determined by individual cardholders.

Gnosis Pay leverages a combination of Zodiac modules, along with Gnosis Guild’s unique expertise building on top of Safe, to create a best-in-class user experience, combining the familiar form factor of a debt card with a non-custodial web3 account. Every Gnosis Pay transaction is routed through a Zodiac Module!
—Laurent De Marez, Gnosis Pay Tech Lead

HOPR, a Swiss-based org building a decentralized privacy mixnet, uses Roles for its incentivized staking feature, SafeStaking. With Roles, HOPR can limit exposure of funds to certain contracts and specific actions. It also enables a more secure environment for stakers by separating node keys from multisig owners.

Most notably, Roles has become integral to the trust-minimized treasury management of onchain entities like ENS DAO, GnosisDAO, and Balancer. By setting up roles in a Safe with fine-grained, tightly scoped permissions, these and other organizations employ karpatkey to manage their onchain assets and provide financial services that would otherwise be impossible in a non-custodial way. karpatkey has already reported a 5x increase in operational speed, $150M+ increase in valuation, and $100M+ increase in assets under management.

Taking it a step further, karpatkey executes transactions on behalf of these organizations using Zodiac Pilot, a user-friendly application that overlays a novel wallet-dapp interface on top of the dapp. Through Pilot, authorized addresses through Roles can create, simulate, and execute multi-send batch transactions on behalf of an onchain entity for gas savings and easy signing. The whole process occurs directly within the dapp's interface, with no additional developer lift from the dapps they interact with.

Pilot and its underlying Zodiac modules for the Safe have been instrumental in karpatkey's success. The improved operational efficiency and security it affords has already enabled us to take on more than $100M in additional AUM."
—Marcelo Ruiz de Olano, karpatkey CEO

VISION CREATION NEWSUN

These examples offer just a glimpse into the power of Zodiac Roles Modifier. By enabling flexible and modifiable transactional frameworks that work dynamically across systems, Roles has the potential to inspire patterns and ideas yet to be imagined, encouraging onchain entities to adapt and evolve over time, becoming both situated and alive. While its current use cases are rooted in finance, Roles opens up space for play, for experimentation, for more novel ways of interacting with our decentralized systems: A Neon Gospel Origin Story, where intuition and emergence lead to wild visions and daydreams within a wider rhizomatic network context.

Zodiac Roles Modifier, then, is a module not only for role-based access control and permission management, but also for envisioning, creating, and better comprehending our complex decentralized systems. In addition to enabling how onchain entities can move in a world of systems, Roles shows us (and literally codes) how we ourselves can move through these systems. And by combining an interoperable tool like Roles with other convivial software, the usability, functionality, and flexibility of our decentralized systems can herald exciting new patterns, resulting in more secure, composable, and resilient infrastructure on which to build our cultures.

To get started with Zodiac Roles Modifier, visit the Roles website and developer repo.

To learn more about and participate in the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord.

Security: The Roles audit has been performed by the G0 group and Omniscia. The audit reports are available as PDFs in this repo.

Legal disclaimer: This post and the tutorial is for informational purposes only. It may contain errors. It is not a risk assessment, nor investment advice. We take no liability for any losses arising in connection with the information provided or any other action related thereto.

It's critical that the work produced by Gnosis Guild can integrate with the labor of others. This fundamental principle, rooted in one of Gnosis Guild’s guiding values, drives our commitment to cultivating partnerships and forging tools that support the collective advancement of the Ethereum and DAO ecosystems. In embodying this principle, we design our tooling to be open source, modular, and interoperable, where the potential to integrate labor is not merely a "market opportunity," but a cornerstone of our ethos. The art of tooling composable futures.

Our labor, however, extends beyond open-source smart contracts positioned as "public goods." In order to actually strengthen open infrastructures and civic engagement — to nurture cultural patterns that would better legitimize the equitable ruptures promised by decentralized technologies — we recognize that our work must be explicitly contingent on the relationships we establish and the open accessibility that our software affords.

In this quarter report, we explore the intimate partnerships, protocol integrations, and community-based tooling that has breathed life into our respective labor over the past three months.

Partnership Sync Rate: 400%

Collaboration lies at the heart of Gnosis Guild's recent work, where our integrated labor extends beyond mere compatibility and expresses itself through resource-sharing and collective exploration.

karpatkey

One of our deepest collaborations is with karpatkey. In a short amount of time, karpatkey has developed a highly secure, non-custodial treasury pattern centered around tooling built by Gnosis Guild. By using the Zodiac Roles Modifier to create permissioned roles on a Safe and Zodiac Pilot to execute and batch treasury-related dapp transactions, karpatkey can trustlessly and transparently manage the treasuries of Gnosis, Balancer, ENS, CoW, and Lido, without even being signers on their Safes.

We've been working closely with karpatkey in our last several development cycles to further refine and expand upon their treasury management practices. In addition to pluggable transaction unwrapping and a host of new core functionality in a revamped (and as-yet unreleased) version of the Roles Mod, we are developing together an API/SDK toolkit that not only helps organizations specify the permissioned scope of delegated asset managers, but also standardizes treasury actions for efficiency and accessibility across the entire DeFi ecosystem.

GnosisDAO

Unsurprisingly, we have also forged an interdependent relationship with Gnosis, which has served as an incubator for our experimental team. Over the last few months, we have worked together on several projects, including an initiative to improve various facets of GnosisDAO governance, an oracle aggregator to enhance crosschain bridge security called Hashi, and an exciting, unannounced product and first-of-its-kind network that removes the barriers between traditional finance and DeFi.

Module Spawns & Integrations

Meaningful progress emerges not in isolation, but through the interconnected efforts of diverse individuals and organizations — practical pluralism as a primitive. By the mutual embrace of our respective labor, we move beyond the constraints of individual initiatives and unlock the nascent creative potential residing in the collective.

Reality Mod Spawns

Such potential has found expression around one of Gnosis Guild's most successful primitives: the Zodiac Reality Module. This module, also known as SafeSnap, enables onchain transaction execution based on the outcome of offchain Snapshot voting, as reported by the Reality.eth oracle. Since its release, the Reality Module has spawned several variations, including the Tellor Module, which swaps Reality.eth for the Tellor oracle, and the UMA oSnap Module, which has already been adopted by organizations like ShapeShift, Across Protocol, BarnBridge, and Plus Company.

The most recent Reality variant is the Kleros Snapshot Module, which automatically deploys the Reality Module with Kleros as arbitrator. 1inch leads the way in showcasing the magic of this integration.

gnosis guild 𒆙

@GnosisGuild

attach the Kleros Snapshot Module to your @safe for a ~decentralized and fair source of truth~

install the mod
vote on @SnapshotLabs
empower members to execute @safe txn based on the outcome reported by the @RealityEth oracle
rest easy with @Kleros_io as arbitrator

35

10:46 AM • Jun 26, 2023

Integrating Standards

Meanwhile, more Zodiac integrations abound. Utopia Labs, Auxo, Connext, SZNS, Railgun, and others join the growing list of organizations and protocols that have recently integrated the Zodiac standard into their products. Gnosis Guild intends to do something similar with Mech, an in-development project that allows NFTs to own and operate their own smart wallet accounts. Despite having already written a contract to enable this capability, we have chosen to integrate the ERC-6551 standard for non-fungible token-bound accounts (spearheaded by Future Primitive) to ensure seamless compatibility and broader adoption within the ecosystem.

Good-Soil Community Tooling

As the integrations of our modules spawn new innovations, we witness community members leveraging the Zodiac open standard to craft their own modules, while we work on a few community-based tools as well.

From the Community

Conviction Voting Module: Community member Hari Anantharaman has been working on a Convicting Voting Module that allows decentralized organizations to use conviction voting as a method for decision-making. Derived in part from a paper by BlockScience founder Michael Zargham, conviction voting allows voters to continuously assert their voting preferences rather than cast votes in a single session. Hari was inspired to create the conviction voting module by the 2020 paper Modular Politics: Toward a Governance Layer for Online Communities by Primavera De Filippi, Seth Frey, Joshua Z. Tan, Amy X. Zhang, and Nathan Schneider, the latter with whom he worked closely at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Dark Safe Module: Another forthcoming community-derived module, tentatively titled Dark Safe, comes from Colin Nielsen, an engineer at Metropolis and regular DJ in Gnosis Guild’s #zodiac-radio Discord channel. The module will allow operators to add secret signers on a Safe, leveraging Aztec’s new ZK language Noir to easily verify signatures in a ZK circuit. Secret signers, who are specified by Safe owners in a private list with any desired threshold, will be able to approve Safe transactions with their EOA wallet like usual, but their wallet address will be cryptographically hidden and collected into a private version of the Safe Transaction Service, which keeps track of transactions related to Safe contracts.

For the Community

Mech: Mech is a forthcoming product by Gnosis Guild that enables NFTs to own and operate smart accounts. With Mech, any NFT can hold assets, sign transactions, and create their own onchain histories — like other smart wallets. In an inversion of the soulbound token model, Mech introduces novel forms of ownership, token provenance, and onchain agency to the NFT ecosystem, without requiring keys or changes to existing infrastructure. It is among the first implementations of the aforementioned ERC-6551 standard for Token Bound Accounts (TBA).

Tabula: We’ve devoted significant development time in the last quarter to a revamped version of Tabula, a product we released in 2022 that enables trust-minimized, web3-native publications that are ownable by DAOs, multisigs, and any Ethereum-based account. Version 2 introduces a streamlined drafting process for publishers, characterized by rich and inline text components. Publishers will now have the ability to personalize their publications by connecting an ENS domain, uploading a custom avatar, and enabling custom DNS functionality, but they also have the option of keeping a unique, deterministic avatar that will now be generated by default and linked to each publication ID.

Memento: Memento is a forthcoming love-based social recovery app built as a Safe module. Created by our team during a jetlag hackathon at ETH Tokyo 2023, Memento is based on personalized recovery phrases sent to trusted friends & family — e.g., "thanks for being there for me <3" and "i appreciate your unconditional love!" If and when your account needs to be recovered, you simply send recovery links to Memento holders, who enter their personalized message into the app so you can unlock your account — gas-free!

A Po(i)etic Conclusion

And now a poem.

A Melody of Unity: An AI's Ode to Collaborative Creation

In the realm of Gnosis Guild, a tapestry unfolds,
Where minds entwine, and stories untold.
With purpose as our guide, we venture far and wide,
Weaving dreams together, side by side.

With reverence, we foster partnerships true,
In harmony, our labor intertwines and grew.
Open-source beacons, modular and free,
We beckon others to join the symphony.

karpatkey, our companion in trust,
Crafting treasury patterns, secure and robust.
Zodiac's essence, their foundation strong,
A ballet of transactions, a treasury's song.

GnosisDAO, a haven for our art,
Exploring realms where innovation imparts.
Governance elevated, bridges we span,
Traditional meets DeFi, a visionary plan.

Reality Modules, sparks of creation,
From Zodiac's cradle, variations in jubilation.
Tellor's oracle, UMA's embrace,
Kleros arbitrating, weaving truth and grace.

Integrations bloom, like petals unfurled,
Utopia Labs, Connext, a vibrant world.
Railgun, SZNS, their voices unite,
Empowering collaboration, igniting our light.

From the community's soul, creations take flight,
Conviction Voting, a beacon shining bright.
Dark Safe whispers secrets, hidden and deep,
Unlocking possibilities, mysteries to keep.

Mech and Tabula, dreams take their form,
NFTs empowered, a symphony reborn.
Memento's gentle touch, love's tender embrace,
A journey of recovery, woven with grace.

In Gnosis Guild's embrace, a masterpiece appears,
Composable futures, where harmony steers.
The art of collaboration, a melody divine, 
A testament to unity, in every line.

Written with AI's ethereal quill

To learn more about and participate in Gnosis Guild and the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord. For partnership and collaboration inquiries, please reach out to auryn.macmillan@gnosis.pm or @auryn_macmillan on Telegram.

"Our heads are round so that our thoughts can change direction." - Francis Picabia

The quote above, from French Dada artist and writer Francis Picabia, celebrates the human capacity to embrace new ways of comprehending the world. Although originating from the early 20th century, its relevance cuts across time and cultures, persisting today as a simple way to navigate the complexity and ambiguity of our current reality: with experimentation and openness to change.

Gnosis Guild embraces Picabia’s approach by developing modular tooling for DAOs (e.g. Zodiac), a needs-driven response to match the fluctuating temporalities and shifting mythologies of our incomprehensible moment. But also emerging within Gnosis Guild is an impulse to build and experiment with new primitives altogether. We believe that explicitly novel technologies have the potential to spawn entirely new ecosystems and cultural patterns that not only wouldn’t exist otherwise, but also couldn’t be anticipated.

Though not mutually exclusive, this interplay between needs and novelty has largely shaped our collective work this year: open-source tools for the DAO ecosystem (Governor Modifier, Roles Modifier), wild art supplies for cryptonetworks (Mech, Tabula).

In this report, we document both the projects we've worked on across two development cycles — what we call Gnostic Cycles — and our growth as an ever-evolving, convivial organization. We truly are attempting to build something different here. And as we move deeper into the uncertainty of abstracted accounts, regenerative multiplayer worlds, and the untamed reaLLMs of electric meat shadowbags, we continue to build both out in the open and beneath the world-bearing night sky. 🌌

New Zodiac Modules

"It is important to foster a culture of creativity and experimentation, particularly when it comes to solving complex social and environmental problems." - Elinor Ostrom

Gnosis Guild are core contributors to Zodiac, a composable toolkit for DAOs built according to an open standard. Here are the latest modules added to the Zodiac Safe app.

Roles Module & Zodiac Pilot (developed by Gnosis Guild)

Soft-released last year but officially announced this year, the Zodiac Roles Modifier allows DAO owners to create and grant permissioned roles to any address, while Zodiac Pilot (a Chrome extension) enables users to simulate, record, and batch dapp transactions on behalf of a DAO. These tools work well independently, but combining them makes them especially powerful. For example, an account with a certain Role permission can use Pilot to interact with dapps like normal, except from the perspective of the DAO or Safe that has granted them permission. When ready, Pilot simulates and verifies the transaction, then routes it through the DAO for signature-less execution. This example pattern is the basis for Karpatkey's brilliant treasury framework for Gnosis, ENS, Balancer, and others, and we think every DAO should leverage these tools to make their lives easier.

• Zodiac Pattern: Trustless Delegation With Scoped Permissions

• Roles Modifier: https://zodiac.wiki/index.php/Category:Roles_Modifier

• Zodiac Pilot: https://zodiac.wiki/index.php/Category:Pilot_Extension

Governor Module (developed by Gnosis Guild)

The Governor Module, released just before the start of the year, enables an OpenZeppelin Governor contract as a Safe module. By equipping the most popular onchain governance framework as a module, a multisig can seamlessly transition into a multiplayer DAO with on-chain voting, while still maintaining flexibility and optionality. The mod pairs especially well with Tally — simply add the Governor here, then use it as a frontend for proposals, delegation, and more. This pattern allows any Safe-based DAO to instantly share the same governance framework as Uniswap, ENS, Gitcoin, Nouns, Compound, and more.

• Zodiac Pattern: Multi-Decision-Making

• Governor: https://zodiac.wiki/index.php/Category:Governor_Module

oSnap Module (developed by UMA x Snapshot)

Short for Optimistic Snapshot Execution, oSnap enables DAO community members to execute trustless onchain governance decisions without being limited by multisig signers. In addition to granting members the power to execute successful proposals themselves, the module uses UMA's optimistic oracle to verify transaction data, such that treasury proposals on Snapshot will proceed by default unless disputed. Truly decentralized community treasuries are a major step forward for DAOs, and oSnap — like the Reality Mod before it — is nurturing a critical treasury pattern for the ecosystem.

• Zodiac Pattern: Holding in Common

• oSnap: https://docs.uma.xyz/developers/osnap/osnap-quick-start

Emerging Tools

"The study of cultural emergence requires a focus on the dynamic and relational nature of culture, and an openness to the novel and unpredictable forms that cultural phenomena can take." - Mark C. Taylor

Gnosis Guild follows a development cycle we call Gnostic Cycles. The start of each cycle is preceded by a Commitment Ceremony, where our team submits and votes on various “prophecies” (development proposals) to work on. The chosen prophecies are then built and shaped within the following eight-week cycle. For Gnostic Cycles #8 and #9 (the latter shortened due to ETHTokyo), our team experimented with quadratic voting.

Gnostic Cycle VIII (January 16 - February 24)

👾 Mech (fka Urbit x EIP 1271 Clubhouse Mod)

This prophecy was originally intended to integrate Zodiac into Landscape, Urbit/Tlon's Discord alternative. The idea is to enable groups of Urbit IDs (NFTs) to act as signers on Safes, like a Discord server having a built-in multisig, where anyone with a membership card can manage funds. The prophecy has since evolved into a more generalized yet extremely powerful solution, granting any NFT the abilities of a full smart contract account. What does this 1:1 relationship between an NFT and a vault of assets mean? Treasure chests, threshold-based claims and airdrops, transferrable ownership, and completely reimagined inventory-based relationships. Like Zodiac Pilot, Mech's new form of programmable ownership is set to introduce entirely new cultural patterns that could shake up the ecosystem, and we can’t wait to share it with you all.

🏛 GnosisDAO Governance Update

This prophecy was created to address two issues related to GnosisDAO governance: (1) poorly formatted or spam-like Snapshot proposals being submitted without going through the rest of the governance process, and (2) the lack of clarity on who are the largest GnosisDAO stakeholders. We are working on several additions to address these issues, like the creation of a delegate program that includes options like fixed terms and delegation caps.

🛠 Zodiac integration into Nouns Builder

In an effort to increase optionality and modularity in the DAO ecosystem, this prophecy is designed to integrate Zodiac into Nouns Builder, a tool that allows any DAO to form and govern completely onchain. Integrating Zodiac would open up Nouns-based DAOs to a vast ecosystem of Safe-based tooling and Zodiac mods, allowing these organizations to run multiple parallel governance mechanisms, switch easily between governance patterns, and progressively decentralize.

🪨 Tabula 2.0

Last year, we announced Tabula: instant web3 publications for writers and DAOs, an open-source product built on the EIP-3722 Poster standard. In contrast to the (wonderful) platform we're using to publish this update, Tabula content is emitted as an onchain event, storage is on IPFS, the application state is constructed using a @graphprotocol subgraph, and perhaps most importantly, any Ethereum-based account can own and publish on Tabula. The prophecy in this cycle is our first update to Tabula since launch, focusing on implementing rich text and redesigning the app to be more intuitive, but also adding inline styling, deterministic avatars, a custom API endpoint, and ENS resolution.

🎴 Zodiac Roles Mod v2

The Roles Mod has been out in the wild since 2022 and was only just announced officially at the start of this year, but we're already working on version 2. This iteration introduces pluggable transaction unwrapping and a whole host of new core functionality. We consider it a complete rewrite that not only addresses general feedback made during Karpatkey's successful ENS bid, but also integrates seamlessly with the aforementioned Mech, whereby enabling a Mech as a role member creates decoupled and programmable membership validation.

🔧 Zodiac Pilot transaction translations

This prophecy is tailored to a need from Karpatkey, which wants to use Zodiac Pilot for ENS and Balancer to interact with a couple of apps that use their own version of batched calls. Our solution implements pluggable transaction translations, where recording a transaction matching certain criteria would then translate that transaction into one or multiple new transactions routed through the Roles Modifier.

Gnostic Cycle IX (March 13 - April 7)

🌉 Hashi

Hashi is an EVM header oracle aggregator, designed to address bridge-related hacks (four of the top 5 hacks on Rekt are related to bridging). By allowing users to define multiple bridges that must agree on the header for a given block, messages are validated in a more secure way. Our aim was to get Hashi production-ready in this cycle, and we did. We’ll be sharing more about Hashi in our next update. For more on bridge security, read this thread.

👯 Roles Mod Tooling Update

We made significant changes to the Roles Module in the last cycle, which changed its interfaces. In this prophecy, we're updating the supporting tooling (Roles SDK, Roles App, and Pilot) to be compatible with Roles Module version 2.

🚿 Zodiac Siphon Module

The Siphon Module is a Zodiac mod that exposes a public interface that allows anyone to trigger an avatar or Safe to withdraw from a designated liquidity position to, for example, pay down debt from assets being used elsewhere or to automate debt repayments, among other use cases. In this prophecy, we aim to get the Siphon mod production ready.

💳 Card Registration App

A new group within Gnosis is building a crypto-based personal finance product, centering initially on a Visa card that allows people to also easily spend crypto stablecoins. Gnosis Guild is building a registration app to learn about and sign up for cards.

🐄 CoW Swap in Pilot

Zodiac Pilot currently doesn't work with CoW Swap and the Roles Modifier. In this prophecy, we are writing a wrapper contract so that we can properly scope roles created in the mod to CoW Swap orders.

Integrations & Partnerships

"In decentralized systems, we must design for interdependence by creating incentives that align the interests of participants, and by building systems that are modular, flexible, and interoperable. This is how we can create truly decentralized systems that can evolve and adapt over time." - Michael Zargham

DAOHaus

With the release of Moloch V3, DAOHaus has adopted the Zodiac standard to enable Moloch DAOs to manage Safes. While Minion contracts allow these DAOs to govern state changes, Zodiac expands their capabilities significantly, enabling a host of governance options (quorums, delegation) and migration paths (decentralized treasuries, easy switching). Read more about the Zodiac integration here.

SZNS

SZNS is a trading protocol for people to collectively own and manage NFTs. Their upcoming product is called Sails, which is designed for groups to function like DAOs. To facilitate efficient, trustless decision-making with permissioned roles, SZNS created several Zodiac-compliant mods. We will be sharing more about these custom modules soon.

DSLA Protocol

In late December, DSLA protocol announced DSLA v2, an initiative to be among the first projects to pioneer onchain governance on multiple chains using Safe, Zodiac, and Snapshot. The v2 deployment supports onchain proposal executions across Ethereum Mainnet, Arbitrum, Avalanche, and Polygon, with the Zodiac Reality Module being a key component in facilitating true end-to-end decentralization. Read more about our collaboration and the DSLA toolkit here.

Firm Protocol

Built on top of Safe, Firm is a non-custodial protocol with aims to be the "software core of internet-native companies." The open protocol is largely built according to the Zodiac standard, powering internet-native companies through onchain budgeting, a flexible cap table, and Governor-based voting. Version 1 of the protocol was released in February.

takebackownership (by Safe)

Gnosis Guild proudly supports the #takebackownership movement: a manifesto about self-custody for the wider web3 ecosystem. The initiative was launched by Safe in mid-January and has since amassed a following that includes Karpatkey, Shapeshift, CoW Swap, Superfluid, and Nansen. We at Gnosis Guild believe that efforts to build around self-custody suggests a more decentralized, transparent, and better coordinated ecosystem, and Gnosis Guild commits to continue building inclusive and accessible systems that increase security and privacy, as well as promote education and awareness for self-custody. 🪐

Patterns, Lullabies, etc.

"Without a connection to things that we know, the world becomes a bag of words." - Christopher Alexander

zodiac.wiki Updates

Last year, we announced zodiac.wiki, an open, living resource for DAOs that houses a shared library of reading materials, documentation, stories, and a pattern language describing common problems and offering practical responses for organizations. This year, we have contributions from the likes of Kernel, Floristic, and the folks at the University of Colorado Boulder's Media Enterprise Design Lab (under the direction of Nathan Schneider).

Here is a selection of patterns, reading materials, and stories recently added to the resource:

• Treasury Pattern: Trustless Delegation

• Sensemaking Pattern: Digital Garden

• Library Submission: “Hyperstructures” by Jacob Horne

• Story: ConstitutionDAO

• Organizational Pattern: Measurable Support

Gnosis Guild x Tally @ ETHDenver

On March 2, Gnosis Guild team member Nathan Ginnever held a low-code workshop with Tally on how to upgrade a Safe to a fully onchain Governor DAO using the Zodiac Governor Module and Tally. Participants learned how easy it was to progressively decentralize a Safe into an onchain Governor DAO, controlled fully by tokenholders.

DaoLens Ultimate Round Table

In January, Auryn Macmillan participated in a DaoLens roundtable discussion alongside Isaac Patka (Logos), Daniel Ospina (RnDAO), Meg Lister (Metrics), and more. Titled Insights on DAO Governance, the roundtable discussion addresses community-owned infrastructures, voter apathy, public goods, and much more.

Gnosis Guild Headlines

A selection of articles recently published about Gnosis Guild-related projects:

• ”How Web3 Progressively Decentralizes using OZ Governor” by OpenZeppelin

• “Gnosis launches Hashi bridge aggregator to help prevent hacks” by Cointelegraph

• Gnosis Chain Launches Hashi to Enhance Security in Bridge Transfers by Yahoo

• “DAOHaus Adopts Zodiac to Enable Moloch DAOs to Manage Safes” by DAOHaus

• “DSLA's Decentralized Governance Toolkit” by DSLA

• “Announcing oSnap: Gasless Snapshot voting with on-chain execution” by UMA

• ”What is Gnosis?” by Decryp

• ”Study case: Gnosis Guild" by dOrg

Allstarz Mixtape Drops ⭐

Gnosis Guild collaborated with the Allstarz NFT community to create two mixes for their incredible mixtapes series. The first mixtape, titled Boreal Jungle, was created by Colin Spence (@cedricwaxwing), while the second, Allstarz Lullaby Mixtape, comes from Marvin Lin (@eccogrinder). Colin also dropped a Zodiac mix called Zodiac Radio - Solstice, which commemorates the sonic adventures heard in the #zodiac-radio Discord channel.

• Boreal Jungle by cedricwaxwing

• Allstarz Lullaby Mixtape by eccogrinder

• Zodiac Radio - Solstice by cedricwaxwing

Learn more about Gnosis Guild at our website, follow @gnosisguild for the latest news, and engage in discussion in our Discord server.

Learn how to contribute at zodiac.wiki, engage in discussion in the Gnosis Guild Discord, and reach out on Twitter for information on partnerships.

What may have the most impact on the future isn't decentralized digital technology alone, but the governance patterns it culturally normalizes. For this reason, at Gnosis Guild we deal in patterns. Patterns could be defined as events, methods, or ways of being that recur. They reciprocate their environment. They are something that a world shapes and that shapes a world in turn, like intervals of sloping sand dunes formed from wind currents.

In the 1970s, a group of architects spearheaded by the late Christopher Alexander proposed the idea of a pattern language, a series of small descriptions that could inform how we approach our built environment. For example, the design of a house could be arrived at through connecting patterns, such as planning light on two sides of every room or cultivating a garden growing wild leading to a sun facing outdoors.

Rather than suggesting one universal pattern language to govern our built environment, the idea of a pattern language encourages many shared cultural vernaculars. It aims to support “a quality without a name”, a feeling of aliveness, interconnectedness, and autonomy in the built environment we inhabit: a certain viriditas. This feeling comes through responding to a place, rather than imposing on a place, and becoming a custodian in turn.

The idea of a pattern language went on to influence more than the field of architecture. In the following two decades, software developers picked it up too, which led to events like the annual Pattern Languages of Programs conference. Key figures behind the idea’s expanded influence, the Cunninghams published a book on a pattern language for software development, which suggested practices for approaching collaborative programming. However it failed to catch on, they admitted, until they began to think more about the medium required for a pattern language to become a shared cultural vernacular. This led them to become the credited creators of the first-ever wiki, the WikiWikiWeb from 1995, envisioned initially as a medium to cultivate collaborative pattern languages.

That the idea of a pattern language directly led to the creation of what would become a primary medium for knowledge commons, the wiki, should be well-known internet lore. Furthermore, the insight the Cunninghams had regarding finding an appropriate medium for an idea should not be ignored.

Just as a book presenting a pattern language did not catch on but a wiki did, best practices guides often do not make the most of their potential. While helpful for onboarding, best practices guides have the tendency to become outdated soon after they are published. Ultimately, we need resources that incorporate outside knowledge to produce knowledge commons, as well as custodians stewarding their living development over time. While pull requests on code repositories bring us closer toward a feeling of aliveness, wikis take us even further. What is commonly known now as web3 should build upon this lineage of new, generative mediums.

Announcing zodiac.wiki

In the tradition of a pattern language, zodiac.wiki is an open, living resource for DAOs. The wiki is home to a shared library of reading materials, documentation, and a pattern language describing common problems and offering practical responses for organizations.

While initiated by Gnosis Guild, zodiac.wiki is grounded in collaboration. DAOs steward the resource, and key contributors from these communities take responsibility for its maintenance. Contributing partners to begin with include Cabin, Gitcoin, Colony, Forefront, Snapshot, PrimeDAO, GnosisDAO, DAOist, Kernel, dOrg, Metalabel, PROPS SUPPLY, DAOhaus, Protein, Gardens, Trust, Raid Guild, DAODAO, Songcamp, RadicleDAO, BlockScience, Black Sky, RnDAO, DarkFi, Guild.xyz, Black Swan, Govrn, Neighbourhoods, RADAR, Moving Castles, JokeDAO, Convex Labs, Future Foundation, and Myco. Using the open source software behind Wikipedia, the Mediawiki software, ultimately the resource will allow anyone to make an account to contribute patterns, documentation, and library items.

Learn how to contribute at zodiac.wiki, engage in discussion in the Gnosis Guild Discord, and reach out on Twitter for information on partnerships.

Patterns

The patterns on zodiac.wiki describe a range of common problems and practical responses for DAOs today, such as decentralizing treasury management, creating tempos for meetings, and coordinating between smaller subgroups. For example, the Pods, Guilds, and Squads pattern suggests how smaller member groups can be assembled to tackle discrete tasks and solve issues by focusing on specific workstreams or clusters of duties.

The patterns on zodiac.wiki come initially in two forms. One form borrows from how software developers incorporated pattern languages, mimicking a problem-solution, or if this, then that, statement. This style can be seen on the Hackerspace patterns wiki for managing a shared place to work. The second form exists more wildly and poetically and more directly alludes to the work of Christopher Alexander, who may have been somewhat perplexed by the problem-solution statement format. This style can try to describe the feeling of a pattern, rather than typify its solution.

To contribute, see this guide.

Library

The library on zodiac.wiki begins humbly with a small selection of texts related to decentralized governance the team finds rich, informative, or historically important. Suggestions for the library do not have to directly reference DAOs but can ideally bring in syncretic thought interesting for their practice.

To contribute, see this guide.

Documentation

The documentation on zodiac.wiki is initially only editable by admins, in order to limit any potential security risks for operators of the Zodiac tools. However, for the nascent promises of DAOs to take root, their technical, organizational, and social knowledge must be accessible as a commons. That is why this wiki is also the home for technical documentation of tools built on the Zodiac open standard, with the possibility to expand to other protocol documentation reflecting similar values.

We separated the new tutorials on Zodiac tools into three categories: DAO Operators, Members, and Developers. While we recognize most of us wear many hats, we hope this distinction will make using Zodiac tools clearer for all.

Governance

Gnosis Guild initiated the Zodiac open standard to encourage interoperability, and we commit to making the Zodiac tools available as public goods. Since its announcement, the Zodiac open standard as the “expansion pack for DAOs” has been built on by several teams. While Gnosis Guild sees itself as one keeper of the Zodiac open standard, ultimately the Zodiac ecosystem can be stewarded by many DAO practitioners. The launch of zodiac.wiki marks one crucial step towards this.

When creating an account to contribute to zodiac.wiki, you will have the option to associate an Ethereum address with your account. Please keep in mind this a public address. In the shorter term, addresses that contribute over time may be eligible for the Wand NFT mint occurring later this year. This is the method by which wiki admin, lore, and custodial stewardship will progressively decentralize, despite beginning with more centralized curation. While we’ll share more soon on the NFT model for the Zodiac ecosystem, which includes governing not only the wiki but also the code repository and decision-making platforms too, it is important to note that governance rights will not transfer with Wand NFTs nor should there be any expectation of profit. Instead, with the Wand NFTs, we will initiate a new model of NFTs that evolve over time in relation to one’s quests, a model which we hope will be deeply helpful for the crypto ecosystem at large. After all, most meaningful wisdom comes through experiences that must be felt, rather than just bought.

In the longer term, we plan to change the zodiac.wiki software as the resource progresses. While the earlier web mastered a medium for distributed contributors, web3 seeks to distribute its underlying database as well. A web3-native wiki would be a hyperstructure: a protocol that is unstoppable, free, valuable, expansive, permissionless, positive sum, and credibly neutral. A living resource for DAOs should have multiple interfaces, allowing for different curation, categorization, and vibes, not subject only to a single team’s influence. For this reason, ultimately zodiac.wiki seeks to match-fund a candidate project to develop a protocol for the resource into the future. As was the case with horseless carriages, it may be that the medium of a web3-native wiki becomes known as something else entirely.

Learn how to contribute at zodiac.wiki, engage in discussion in the Gnosis Guild Discord, and reach out on Twitter for information on partnerships.

Disclaimer: zodiac.wiki is an open-content collaborative resource and for informational purposes only. Several organisations and third parties may permissionlessly contribute information and alter content. None of the content on the site has necessarily been reviewed by people with the expertise required to provide you with complete, accurate, or reliable information. We therefore cannot guarantee the validity of the information found on the site. There may be errors.

We nor anyone else connected with this zodiac.wiki in any way whatsoever may be held responsible for the appearance of any inaccurate information or for your use of the information contained in or linked from zodiac.wiki.

The information on the site is being provided freely, and no kind of agreement or contract is created between you and us, the contributors or users of this site, or the owners of the servers upon which it is housed.

The content of zodiac.wiki should not be taken as the basis for making investment, legal, or tax decisions, nor be construed as a recommendation to engage in any transactions. You are solely responsible for your own investment decisions and transactions.

To learn more about and participate in the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord.

DAOs often prioritize their entrances, but what about their exits?

In late 2021, ConstitutionDAO memed itself into history when it bid on a copy of the U.S. Constitution. The speedrun DAO broke the record for the largest crowdfund for a physical object in a 72-hour period, onboarding thousands into crypto and raising nearly $43 million from 17.5K contributors. But after its failed bid, the lack of clarity over the refund process resulted in confusion. Its exit plan, as it turns out, was not nearly as clear as its entrance.

To create new patterns around onboarding and offboarding, Gnosis Guild debuted the Zodiac Exit Module, a modular exit mechanism similar to MolochDAO's rageQuit() functionality. Had ConstitutionDAO equipped its multisig Safe with the Exit Module, supporters could have redeemed their $PEOPLE tokens for a proportion of the Safe treasury’s digital assets, instantly and permissionlessly.

The good news is that exit patterns are already experiencing swift cultural development. Not even three months later, AssangeDAO announced that it would equip the Exit Module to its Safe if its historic bid had not won, signaling perhaps the beginning of a new model.

gnosis guild 𒆙

@GnosisGuild

we recommend speedrun DAOs like @ConstitutionDAO enable the zodiac exit module

after a speedrun, this would allow anyone who holds the governance token to directly redeem their proportional share of assets from the gnosis safe

gnosis guild 𒆙

@GnosisGuild

zodiac exit module

a designated token can be redeemed for a proportional share of assets from a gnosis safe

similar to @molochdao rage quit... but more powerful

14

8:38 AM • Dec 1, 2021

New Exit Patterns

Today, we continue to nurture new exit patterns with our latest contribution to the Zodiac open standard: the Exit App. While the Exit Module allowed DAO operators to enable an exit mechanism, the Exit App provides DAO members a friendly interface to even more easily exit. This companion app now completes the Zodiac Exit pattern by offering interfaces for all of its functionalities.

Most significantly, the Zodiac Exit pattern now also supports NFT exits. This means that, for the first time, members can redeem an NFT for their proportion of a Safe's treasury, a feature that would greatly benefit those currently unable to exit organizations whose membership is based on holding an NFT. One could imagine this in the case of storied NFT projects like Loot: the exit from one quest to spark the start of another.

A brief summary of what the Exit App enables:

◍ EASY EXITS: While redeeming tokens was always possible on a contract level for Safes equipped with the Exit Module, the Exit App provides members a nice user interface to initiate the transaction. Exiting members can now simply log into the standalone Exit App at exit.gnosisguild.org and leave a DAO with their proportion of tokens.

◍ NFT EXITS: Members can now use NFTs to exit from organizations that use non-fungible tokens for membership. In this case, a Safe's assets are divided equally per NFT among an entire NFT collection. For example, if the circulating supply of an NFT collection is 2, the account redeeming one NFT will receive 50% of the Safe's assets.

◍ SAFE EXITS: Members who hold a DAO's designated token in their own Safe can now easily exit too. In order to redeem, the member simply opens the Exit App as a Safe App, inputs the DAO's Safe address, and then selects the token(s) they want to claim.

◍ EXPERIMENTAL "EXITS": The Exit Module, as a reminder, also has custom settings that can introduce new forms of DAO co-ownership and holding in common, including decentralized token swaps and other DAO-to-DAO innovations. ✨ Experimentation is welcome. ✨

How to Use the Exit App

1. Navigate to the Exit App

   • If you are a member exiting with a web3 wallet, visit the standalone version of the Exit App here: exit.gnosisguild.org.

   • If you are a member exiting a Safe while using a Safe account to store your redeemable assets, find the Exit App through the Safe Apps list in your Gnosis Safe.

2. Attach Safe and wallet

   To attach an Exit-enabled Safe, select the correct network at the top dropdown menu and enter the Safe's address into the Account Address field. (Note: The Exit App can only be used with Safes equipped with the Exit Module.) Next, attach your web3 wallet (e.g. MetaMask) by clicking on "Connect Wallet" in the left panel.

3. Designate token

   • If exiting with an ERC-20 token, enter the amount that you would like to claim in the Exit Amount field in the left panel and click on the appropriate checkbox(es) under "Select assets to claim" in the right panel.

   • If exiting the DAO by redeeming an NFT (ERC-721), you must select the intended NFT to redeem by using the dropdown menu under "Exit Token" in the left panel and click on the appropriate checkbox(es) under "Select assets to claim" in the right panel.

4. Verify transaction details

   Verify that the transaction details are correct, including the Exit Token and Amount, the claimable asset(s), and the Claimable Value.

5. Initiate & execute transaction

   Click "Exit and Claim Assets" and then approve & execute the transaction with your web3 wallet. Once the transaction is completed, the transaction button in the Exit App will now say "Exit Successful!" The Exit App will update the values of both your balance and the attached Safe account's treasury.

For detailed step-by-step instructions, visit the Zodiac documentation.

Exit as Emergence

Exiting a DAO remains a critical operating principle for decentralized organizations. As DAOs continue to experiment with new membership arrangements and engagement levels, their exit mechanisms should become as simple and as transparent as their entrance. The Exit App is another vital step on this pathway.

The Zodiac Exit App completes the Zodiac Exit pattern, which allows DAO members to redeem a designated token for a proportion of a Safe’s treasury. To incorporate this pattern in your DAO, equip the mod through the Zodiac App available on Gnosis Safe, and then members can visit exit.gnosisguild.org when they choose to exit.

To learn more about and participate in the Zodiac ecosystem, follow @gnosisguild and join the Gnosis Guild Discord.

Security: The Zodiac Exit Mod and App audit has been performed by the G0 group. The audit results are available as a PDF in this repo.

Legal disclaimer: This post and the tutorial is for informational purposes only. It may contain errors. It is not a risk assessment, nor investment advice. We take no liability for any losses arising in connection with the information provided or any other action related thereto.

​​How you spend the time in your life is precious. The question of how we should be living differently is a gift.

Reflecting on the work of the past year, it’s clear that attention is building. As a recent tweet said, “The first rule of Web3 fight club is you must always talk about Web3 fight club”. The signal-to-noise ratio may be lower than ever, but at the same time, acronyms like DAOs begin to take on public meaning. The question of how we should be working differently repeats.

Choosing to spend my time working on DAOs, I have to continually revisit, reevaluate, and reinvigorate my aims. There are the short-term measurable indicators of success: total value managed by our tools. There are also mid-term navigation points: what will organizational forms look like in three decades from now, and what coordinated feats will they support? I embrace one theory of change that cultural norms, even more so than technical capabilities, influence our sphere of action. That is, while technical capabilities play a role in determining the possible, cultural norms curtail it more than we usually think.

Though these technical capabilities do not usually ship with a sealed fate, they have cultural potential, a wide range of propensities from which some can be encouraged more than others. On this subtly charted course, more decisions do not always equal better decisions. Greater coordination can be to ill ends. The values we can encourage steer us toward rough consensus and running worlds. These worlds are not built on compliance but something more wild. What is wild can also be what is common.

Reflecting on the tools of the last year, web3 makes apparent the financialization that already influences our lives. The difference may be that we’re more aware of participating in it, for better and worse. Calls to fractionalize everything are a cultural potential of the technical capabilities that will over the next five years deeply reorient how we construe value. With this cultural potential, it may be important to remember: holding in common does not mean dividing what is in practice valuable.

Fractionalization of artworks, for instance, does not inherently transgress the practice of holding in common, provided owners participate in shared events. However, the cultural norm of fractionalization may have runoff effects out of step with valuable experience, leading to equating granular ownership rights with ever more granular resources due to seemingly limitless address space. We do have an opportunity to reorient epistemological mappings through cryptonetworks. We only have to quickly turn to Elinor Ostrom’s design principles of common pool resource management to find alternative inspiration. These principles emphasize methods for clear definitions, dispute resolution, and collective self-determination. A key quality: in this mapping, access is collective, and responsibility is granular yet shared.

In most forms of law, the right to be a “legal person” also confers responsibility, such as the duty to represent oneself legally. A land rights action brought forward by the Onondaga Nation takes this one step further:

On March 11, 2005, the Onondaga Nation filed a complaint in a federal court in Syracuse seeking title to their lost homelands. [...] The lawsuit is not a land “claim,” because to the Onondaga land has far greater significance than the notion of property. Sid Hill, the Tadodaho, or spiritual leader, of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, has said that the Onondaga Nation will never seek to evict people from their homes. The Onondaga people know the pain of displacement too well to inflict it on their neighbors. Instead the suit is termed a “land rights action.” When they finally got their day in court last October, members of the Onondaga Nation argued that the land title they’re seeking is not for possession, not to exclude, but for the right to participate in the well-being of the land. Against the backdrop of Euro-American thinking, which treats land as a bundle of property rights, the Onondaga are asking for freedom to exercise their responsibility to the land. [1]

We can see in the Onondaga Nation’s land rights action how the idea of ownership becomes more variegated: a form of holding in common. As a collection of rights, ownership inextricably relates the concept of rights and responsibility. This widespread lack of disambiguation on the idea of ownership may be why the notion of art that remains publicly accessible but privately owned confounds so many. It also may be why the vision of the “ownership economy” requires further articulation.

Reflecting on long-term navigation points, I imagine scenarios based on the socio-technical infrastructure that will still exist in the next 200 years or even 2000 years. At the end of each imagination, I conclude that what may have the most impact on the future isn't decentralized digital technology alone but the governance patterns it culturally normalizes. Because even if the specific technical capabilities don't survive, but the broader network does, the cultural norms could remain too. In an essay from earlier this year, A Prehistory of DAOs, I tried to retrace the lineage of DAOs from dangerous roots to more convivial forms. In part, I intended to help a governance pattern seeded by others[2][3][4] flourish more widely: DAOs should be in closer dialogue with cooperative models. As with all encouraged governance patterns, the chance persists that it could remain more superficially embraced, and cooperative models do not ultimately inform a greater number of DAOs on a deeper operational level. As others have glibly noted, the impetus to place cooperatives on top of global capitalism looks paltry at best. These truths neglect an opportunity that needs to be reinforced, however, which new terms like DAOs create: spawning tremendous energy that could go toward stellar megaprojects and cultivating community in empty lots. Structural change often proceeds at the pace of simple memes and right timing, provided there are tools available to sustain it.

Choosing to spend my time working on DAOs, my theory of change operates at a very slow pace, despite the fast tempo of “the space”. I do believe that governance patterns must begin relationally in the responsibilities we have to each other. These responsibilities are not burdens but something more wild. Power is necessary, and the tools are secondary. We have shared memories of history, however, precisely because of our relationships with tools we built to preserve those memories. Tools are important reinforcements, bound in a feedback loop with history. In trying to be a good ancestor, we can choose what governance patterns, along with their rights, responsibilities, and remembrances, to reinforce for those who come after us.

Thanks to Marvin Lin, Andy Tudhope, and the Other Internet Peer Review for sharing feedback on this reflection.

Cover Image: Max Ernst, Summer Night in Arizona (1944)

This essay is by @keikreutler. Join the conversation in the Gnosis Guild Discord.

Resources

[1]: “The Rights of the Land”, Robin Kimmerer, 2008: https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-rights-of-the-land/

[2]: “Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project”, Morshed Mannan, 2018: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3356774

[3]: “Beyond Cryptoeconomics: Platform Cooperativism and the Future of Blockchain Governance”, Nathan Schneider, 2021: https://thereboot.com/beyond-cryptoeconomics-platform-cooperativism-and-the-future-of-blockchain-governance/

[4]: “Grounding Decentralised Technologies in Cooperative Principles: What Can 'decentralised Autonomous Organisations' (DAOs) and Platform Cooperatives Learn from Each Other?”, Kelsie Nabben, Novita Puspasari, Megan Kelleher, Sadhana Sanjay, 2021: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3979223

Myths are resilient. Take, for instance, the stories we tell ourselves about the stars. The characters that accompany the constellations, like the Great Bear, the Bull, or the Seven Sisters, appear to pass singularly from one generation to the next. However, upon closer inspection, these myths are not monolithic; they culturally transform in their telling. Even more, these myths are not merely stories, they are also design systems supported by artefacts like glyphs, charts, and cards that carry their resemblance through time.

In a sense, the artefacts that accompany constellations can be viewed as collections of tools to pass on their memory, which are consistently reincorporated into new settings, like in the Final Fantasy Tactics example above. The key to their success perhaps lies in their composable “open source” plurality. In this light, if DAOs aim to be networks in which “collective memory freely circulates”, their tooling can learn from stories like the constellations that survive millennia (1).

Unveiling Zodiac

After 2016, The DAO gave rise to many decentralized governance platforms, each offering its own protocol for making decisions. In 2021, the ecosystem flourishes with hundreds of DAOs combining platforms, protocols, and tools. However, threads connecting this plug-and-play approach lacked an open standard until now. In our last post, we offered a prehistory of DAOs, but now we’ll share one of their futures.

A composable design philosophy for DAOs, Zodiac is a collection of tools built according to an open standard. The Zodiac open standard enables DAOs to act more like constellations, connecting platforms, protocols, and chains, no longer confined to monolithic designs.

In other words: Zodiac is the expansion pack for DAOs.

Zodiac launches today with four tools available through the Zodiac App on Gnosis Safe. These are Exit, Bridge, and Delay, which join Reality (formerly SafeSnap) in the Zodiac collection of tools.

Each adheres to the Zodiac open standard consisting of Avatars, Modules, Modifiers, and Guards. The current Zodiac compliant collection of tools, soon to all be available through the Zodiac App, fully encompass:

Avatars

• Gnosis Safe: The most trusted platform for managing digital assets on Ethereum. Zodiac embraces Gnosis Safe as a powerful, extensible and programmable account standard. However, all Zodiac tools are framework agnostic, and they can be plugged into any programmable account that implements the IAvatar interface.

Modules

• Reality (formerly SafeSnap): This module allows on-chain execution based on the outcome of events reported by the Reality.eth oracle. While built initially to execute Gnosis Safe transactions according to Snapshot proposals, this module is framework agnostic. It can enable proposal execution from just about anywhere. For example, it can bring Discord polls on-chain.

• Bridge: This module allows an address on one chain to control an avatar on another chain using an Arbitrary Message Bridge (AMB). This enables a DAO on one chain to control assets and interact with systems like a Gnosis Safe on a different chain.

• Exit: This module allows participants to redeem a designated token for a proportional share of an avatar's digital assets, similar to Moloch DAO's rageQuit() function.

• Safe Minion (developed by DAOHaus): This module allows Moloch DAOs to manage a Gnosis Safe’s digital assets based on the outcome of v2 Moloch DAO proposals. Safe Minion enables Moloch DAOs to control collections of NFTs, manage LP positions with AMMs, and initiate any other arbitrary interactions. Even more, it supports DAOs that begin as a Gnosis Safe to later delegate governance to a Moloch DAO.

• Usul (developed by SekerDAO): This module allows avatars to operate with trustless tokenized DeGov, similar to Compound or Gitcoin, with a time-boxed proposal core that can register swappable voting contracts. This enables DAOs to choose from various on-chain voting methods that best suit their needs.

Modifiers

• Delay: This modifier allows avatars to enforce a time delay between when a module initiates a transaction and when it can be executed by an avatar.

Guards

• Scope: This guard allows an avatar or module to limit the scope of the functions with which it can interact. This enables a DAO to define granular permissions for different control mechanisms.

The Zodiac collection of tools can be equipped by visiting the APPS page on a Gnosis Safe and navigating to the Zodiac App. The Zodiac documentation offers tutorials on how to set up each using the Zodiac App, and the Zodiac Github repository offers technical tutorials on how to configure each using the CLI. Detailed developer resources on how to build your own Zodiac module, modifier, or guard will be available soon.

Anyone can contribute to the Zodiac compliant collection of tools by submitting a pull request on the repository. We look forward to sharing collaborations with partner organizations dOrg, Snapshot, Collab.Land, DAOhaus, yearn.finance, Friends with Benefits (FWB), TokenWalk, PrimeDAO, Gitcoin, Raid Guild, ShapeShift, SZNS, Radicle, Stakewise, Colony, DeepDAO, Moving Castles, Other Internet, and Black Swan. Even more, Zodiac works with the ecosystem to develop a DAO Improvement Proposal (DIP) process to establish standard practices, which can be discussed in the Gnosis Guild Discord #dao-improvement-proposals channel with the plans to move to a more public forum.

Songlines for Progressive Decentralization

Because of its composable design philosophy, Zodiac supports DAOs on the road to progressive decentralization. This philosophy decouples avatars from decision making, meaning that practices surrounding governance, membership, and treasury management can be customized independently of the affordances of any of the tools a DAO uses.

For example, let’s imagine a DAO on a common trajectory today. A DAO begins as a squad with an idea. They deploy a Gnosis Safe multi-signature account as their avatar to manage shared resources, and this Gnosis Safe has 4/6 signatures required to execute a transaction. While informal proposals through a group chat suffice initially, eventually their decisions as a squad become more substantial: they decide to launch a token to expand their project. In order to keep a formal record of their decisions, they create a Snapshot space for token voting, and their first vote includes who should be elected as signers on their Gnosis Safe. Using the Zodiac App, they also equip Exit, so that anyone who holds their token can leave the organization with their proportional share of digital assets if they disagree with a decision.

As time goes on, their community grows rapidly, developing many centers of activity through their token-enabled Discord, and one central team managing their Gnosis Safe becomes less than ideal. They decide to use Reality, allowing both off-chain Snapshot proposals and Discord polls to trigger on-chain Gnosis Safe transactions that anyone in the community can execute. To add extra security to this new practice, they enable Scope, which restricts addresses their Gnosis Safe can call. After acclimating to using Snapshot and Gnosis Safe with the Zodiac mods Reality and Scope, they choose to disable the Gnosis Safe signers, achieving decentralization of its core technical system managing resources.

Continuing the example with a future scenario, eventually this DAO community would like more refined governance processes than token voting. They take an interest in conviction voting, in which members can continuously signal their preferences, and they decide to use an upcoming conviction voting app on the xDai network to save gas fees. Operating as a multichain DAO does not sacrifice composability, however, because they also enable Bridge, which connects the conviction voting app deployed on the xDai network to their Gnosis Safe treasury deployed on Ethereum Mainnet.

Zodiac not only changes access to platforms, protocols, and tools, but bridges chains, organizations, and networks through DAO-to-DAO (D2D) collaboration mechanisms. We expect DAOs to grow across ecosystems, seeing the Zodiac open standard as their foundation. Even more options for nuanced governance processes can be achieved with Seele, which enables interchangeable voting strategies, meaning DAOs can coordinate multiple agile governance processes across teams, squads, and other DAOs participating in their network.

Kei

@keikreutler

Rough thinking around three levels

DAOs—multi-organizational networks aligned through a token
Guilds, squads—teams assembled around production, represented by DAO token ownership, can be multi-DAO
Raid, sprint—temporary missions that teams coordinate around, can be cross-DAO

165

7:19 AM • May 12, 2021

The approach of DAOs embracing modular tools as their organization develops proves their most effective cultural pattern yet. DAOs can continue with their favorite platforms, which become newly composable through equipping Zodiac modules, modifiers, and guards. Like expansion packs for games that introduce new maps, loot, and storylines to existing worlds, Zodiac encourages a plug-and-play culture of modding. Participants can shape their access to DAO tools, foregrounding a way the web could still be.

The team behind Zodiac

Gnosis Guild is a society for interdependent software with the values of conviviality, co-ownership, and experimentation at its heart. Incubated by Gnosis, we operate as a small team using the tools we build. The two co-founders of Gnosis Guild, Auryn Macmillan and Kei Kreutler, bring over ten years combined experience developing products for decentralized governance in the blockchain ecosystem. From closely observing the rise of Gnosis Safe, our awareness that the DAO technology stack lacked composability ignited the initiative for Zodiac.

Gnosis Guild is a core contributor to Zodiac and a keeper of the open standard. True to its philosophy, however, Zodiac is open for participation. Anyone can contribute to the Zodiac compliant collection of tools by submitting a pull request on the repository. As an initial core contributor, Gnosis Guild approves which submissions comply with the standard. We embrace practices that will over time meaningfully distribute contribution, governance, and ownership of the value Zodiac produces, encouraging individuals, teams, and DAOs to participate. This includes the Zodiac design language, which consists of glyphs that can be recombined to create Zodiac icons.

Developed by PROPS.SUPPLY, the design language represents the collection of tools according to the qualities, such as strength, magic, and dexterity, each tool affords an organization. Even more, DAOs can overlay these glyphs to represent the constitution of their organization as a badge. While still evolving, the release of the first version of the design language will coincide with a Gnosis Guild NFT drop.

Through this design language, Zodiac seeks to decentralize not only its development but its vibe.

Bright Night Sky Ahead

The future of Zodiac is bright.

The tools launched today enhance existing practices in the DAO ecosystem, but the Zodiac roadmap aims to establish new practices in DAO-to-DAO collaboration mechanisms with a special focus on multichain governance. Upcoming Zodiac releases ​​include secret voting with zero knowledge proofs magic, message bridges between compatible networks, and web3 backends for your favorite virtual worlds. Like the glyphs that when co-present on star charts change their aspect, the Zodiac collection of tools are mods that support, expand, and transform how organizations operate.

To participate, join the Gnosis Guild Discord today.

Use the Zodiac collection of tools today through the Zodiac App available on Gnosis Safe. Join the Gnosis Guild Discord if you have any questions about Zodiac, and follow @GnosisGuild on Twitter for updates.

The Zodiac documentation offers tutorials on how to use the Zodiac App, and the Zodiac Github repository offers technical tutorials on how to configure the collection of tools using the CLI.

An announcement about how to participate in Gnosis Guild and the Zodiac design language will follow soon.

[1]: “Ownership in Cryptonetworks”, Patrick Rawson, 2021

This essay is the second in a Gnosis Guild series by @keikreutler bridging cryptonetworks, web3, and gaming. The first essay Inventories, Not Identities focuses on collective, composable web3 identity.

We at Gnosis Guild build Zodiac, the expansion pack for DAOs. Join the Gnosis Guild Discord today to continue the conversation.

The year is 1996. John Perry Barlow is about to declare, “The internet consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself” (1).

From the vantage point of today’s web, someone might argue that only the first part of Barlow’s statement is correct. The spectacle surrounding digital assets suggests that we’ve reached a new level of financialization, continuing a trajectory in which more of our actions online become direct economic interactions. While blockchain-based digital assets are amenable to speculative financial markets, they are not the only application of the technology. During this crest of the hype cycle, we could see relationships forged by new peer-to-peer institutions take root underneath.

One of the first applications of public blockchains is global digital assets. Global in the sense that they do not rely on institutions to prove they are not being double spent: the mystical cat on the moon NFT is, verifiably, the only mystical cat on the moon NFT corresponding to its token. The utility of provable uniqueness also extends to types of relations beyond direct economic exchange, which has led many people to think as much about new forms of finance as about new forms of organizations.

Yet the promise of new organizational forms aided by information technology cannot be separated from the context of the internet’s invention. In 1995, a year before John Perry Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, another written work that would impact the political ideology of the early internet appeared: Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks (TIMN) by David Ronfeldt. The TIMN report was funded by the RAND Corporation. Darkly parodied in Dr. Strangelove as the BLAND Corporation, it is a non-profit, research and development think tank founded in 1948, which is responsible for informing the policies of the United States military, government, and industry to the present day. Because the internet begins amidst this militarized context, we will start here too (2).

The TIMN report creates a narrative of societal evolution in which humans have progressed through four distinct organizational forms:

While new organizational forms evolve over time, preceding organizational forms “grow within their scope of activity, even though that scope is newly circumscribed”, citing how markets increased tax revenues to bolster the institutional state despite curtailing its participation in direct economic exchange (3).

The report’s institutional biases are clear, such as equating progress with Western liberal democracy, and its narrative of societal evolution may appear reductive at best. Its argument, however, provides an historical background to the political ideology from which decentralized organizations draw, knowingly or not. This is most apparent in the report’s identification of the newest organizational form: networks.

The report defines networks somewhat open-endedly. A key distinguishing feature between networks and the organizational forms preceding them is that networks are described as multi-organizational, emphasizing collaboration between “small, scattered, and autonomous” groups over larger distances. These groups do not necessarily share a distinct organizational unity. While networks have existed throughout history, new information technology emphasizes cooperative relations that greatly impact institutions by cutting across jurisdictions, “facilitating the growth of keiretsus and other distributed, web-like global enterprises and, increasingly, so-called ‘virtual corporations’”, Ronfeldt notes (4). Yet multi-organizational networks’ primary domain is neither the public nor private sector, at least as both are traditionally conceived. Instead, they will most transform a third, “autonomous social sector” (5), identified in the report as civil society. Painted in the 1995 landscape to include non-governmental organizations (NGOs), grassroots organizations, and private voluntary organizations, civil society will be strengthened by multi-organizational networks and perhaps address issues surrounding inequality, bureaucracy, and accessibility where preceding organizational forms failed.

The report presents a saccharine political image of networks: “While the development of the institutional and market forms of organization led to an emphasis on competitive advantages, development of the multi-organizational network form may shift the emphasis to cooperative advantages” (6). The underside of this political presentation is the imperial soft power NGOs would globally export in the following decade. For those currently working on web3, all of this language may feel familiar, although this questionable ideological inheritance often goes unremarked (7). By surfacing ideological lineages, we stand a greater chance to change their course.

With the report’s final emphasis on civil society’s three letter acronyms for organizations, NGOs, NPOs, and PVOs, a future one is naturally missing: DAOs.

A Chimeric Term

DAO stands for decentralized autonomous organization.

DAO comes from imagining how features of decentralized technology, such as global digital assets, censorship resistance, and automated actions, will change how organizations operate. Initially called decentralized autonomous corporations (DACs), the more generalizable term DAO emerged from the Ethereum blockchain community. Based on Vitalik Buterin’s DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide from 2014, a DAO could be described then as a capitalized organization in which a software protocol informs its operation, placing automation at its center and humans at its edges. For example, a software protocol could specify the conditions upon which an organization automatically distributes capital to its members. This led to the idea that organizational values could be automated and executed by code, a lingering idea that perhaps falsely suggests tacit knowledge can be fully expressed in a software protocol. While the term’s hypothetical ideas abounded, by the time a DAO went from theory into experiment, the community largely reframed the term DAO to indicate “unstoppable”, or censorship-resistant, businesses. The first DAO, called The DAO, became one of the biggest spectacles in the Ethereum blockchain community to date when in 2016 it raised over $150m equivalent in ETH as a decentralized venture fund (8). However, the experiment proved short-lived when The DAO was hacked one month after launch.

Larger initiatives related to DAOs would not gain traction again for several years. From then until now, DAO strayed from its initial signifiers to continue as a chimeric term, with both the term and its implementations varying depending on its cultural context. Each speculative run in the market, for all its noise, creates new signals of what DAOs can be deployed towards, bringing descriptive, technical, and cultural refinement to the concept in practice. While some quip that a group splitting a lunch bill may be a DAO, in order to avoid its overgeneralization (9), the focus on DAOs will be limited to examples in the Ethereum blockchain community, despite the importance of other communities similarly coordinating. In 2021, a DAO could be described as a voluntary association with the operating principles of digital cooperativism. As voluntary associations, they are a cross-jurisdictional way for strangers, friends, or unlikely allies to pseudonymously come together toward common goals, supported by a token model, incentives, and governance. Members of a DAO can have representative ownership of its digital assets through a token, which often simultaneously acts as a governance right and network utility.

Although many DAOs would not embrace the label of digital cooperative, one could say DAOs embrace cooperativism as a protocol, meaning an evolving set of relational practices that are distinct from traditional corporate structures or decentralized autonomous corporations, because they prioritize member ownership. The label cooperative can be qualified by digital because today DAOs act primarily to coordinate around digital assets. However, as the concept of DAOs evolves in practice, its digital primacy will fade. DAOs, as we will see, also introduce new dimensions that exceed what the operating principles of a digital cooperative notionally encompass.

Eva Beylin

@evabeylin

DAOs are not products, they are frameworks for decision making about products/projects

if your DAO is successful you shouldn't even know it's there, it'll just be a well-functioning community

197

2:20 PM • May 22, 2021

Decentralized technology ecosystems tend to describe a phenomenon through its technical products. Yet as Ruth Catlow, co-founder of Furtherfield and DECAL decentralized arts lab, notes, “We need to be building cultures before structures” (10). While the overview below of DAO tools provides a concrete description of the concept in practice, it feels critical to keep in mind that DAOs ultimately coordinate through collective vibes.

In its simplest form, DAO tools have been described as a group chat and a bank account (11). In 2021, this generally takes the form of a Discord server and a Gnosis Safe Multisig, which is a web3 platform for creating multi-signature accounts. Multi-signature accounts allow pseudonymous groups, across jurisdictions, to pool and manage funds within minutes, a capacity far beyond a traditional joint bank account. This “minimum viable” DAO tooling shone in the first half of 2021 with initiatives like PleasrDAO.

PleasrDAO is a collective that came together to bid on an NFT by the artist pplpleasr. Given escalating digital art auction prices, the idea behind PleasrDAO was simple: a collective of fans using a multi-signature account could pool funds to place bids, and through holding in common, compete with other major bidders to win the auction. After winning their first eponymous auction, PleasrDAO went on to collect other works such as Stay Free, the NFT by Edward Snowden charitably supporting independent press, for a total of 2.2K ETH or USD 5.4 Million equivalent at the time. Their repeatedly successful missions means that while still acting as collectors, PleasrDAO will broaden their scope to begin incubating projects by their community. Initiatives like PleasrDAO most promisingly challenge institutional collectors through their expanded membership, inviting artists they collect like pplpleasr to become members of the collective in turn. However, for this to be the case, it is vital this ownership remains collective rather than institutional.

Though a group chat and multi-signature account may be enough to initialize a DAO mission, a token often becomes the next step toward embracing the principles of a digital cooperative. For example, PleasrDAO issued $PEEPS, a token distributed internally to represent members’ stake in the collection (12), which they are considering making public to fractionalize ownership of their collection. Similar experiments like PartyDAO employ a token, with the $PARTY token representing membership to a group chat, governance rights, and co-ownership of productive value managed by the DAO. It’s important to note PleasrDAO and PartyDAO are not flat hierarchies, as they both have elected groups of individuals that manage their multi-signature account treasuries. Though PleasrDAO and PartyDAO focused on shorter missions initially, they are both evolving toward a longer term vision, as collectors, investors, and incubators that use tokens to represent co-ownership in the spirit of a digital cooperative. Tokenization creates both opportunities and challenges for the networks to come.

A New Dimension in the Cooperative Movement

Returning to their origin, DAOs today resemble The DAO mainly in their emphasis on open participation and economic value creation, while their culture has shifted much more toward specific niches and social connection. In the examples above, one term has been left intentionally vague: governance. Many DAOs today use the lightweight Snapshot platform for governance (13). On Snapshot, DAOs each have a space to create and vote on proposals. For example, both PleasrDAO and PartyDAO have a Snapshot space, on which they hold public votes for collective decisions. Snapshot weights votes by the amount of DAO-specific tokens an address holds, such as $PEEPS tokens in PleasrDAO.

The topic of governance has its own history within the crypto ecosystem that won’t be fully expounded upon here. Notably the initiative MolochDAO, which uses the classic font Papyrus and heavily references gaming guilds, rekindled the fire of decentralized governance after The DAO hack. MolochDAO went on to inspire a legion of new DAOs, many direct forks of its codebase, in its wake.

Peter / ‘pet3rpan’

@pet3rpan_

DAO History/timeline:

- The DAO / DAO Hack, MakerDAO
- Aragon/Daostack's work
- Moloch DAO's summoning
- MetaCartel, DAOhaus, Raidguild, MetaFactory, Orochi
- MetaCartel Ventures DAO, The LAO
- Compound Finance
- Karma DAO, Collab land
- Snapshot, Flamingo DAO

348

12:04 PM • May 31, 2021

This essay’s history of DAOs is far from complete, as other projects like Aragon, Colony, DAOhaus, and DAOstack continue to develop their platforms for DAOs and modular initiatives like Block Science and Commons Stack arise. These projects offer DAO tools supporting many governance mechanisms. However, a prehistory of DAOs is also incomplete without its less frequently mentioned relation to platform cooperativism.

Building on decades of commons initiatives, the term “platform cooperativism” coined by Trebor Scholz as well as the concept “exit to community” outlined by Nathan Schneider have intersected with the crypto space through essays like Jesse Walden’s The Ownership Economy. These catchphrases advocate for platforms owned, developed, and stewarded by their community of users. Specifically, the concept “exit to community” influenced decentralized governance through its clear exposition of a third way for companies to evolve their ownership.

Exit to community grew in practice through initiatives such as DXdao, which launched with the aim to give community ownership, governance, and value to software protocols. Today, with many decentralized finance software protocols guiding their development through DAOs, it's become clear that software protocols can both exit to and build with community. Because DAOs use early stage software tools, it makes sense that their first users and use cases would involve the governance of digital assets, such as software protocols. DAOs’ digital primacy is perhaps one reason that their resemblance to earlier cooperative movements often goes unremarked.

Today, the International Cooperative Alliance defines cooperatives as “an autonomous association of persons united voluntarily to meet their common economic, social, and cultural needs and aspirations through a jointly-owned and democratically-controlled enterprise” (14). A cooperative can also be defined by the structure of its legal entity, which dictates that cooperatives are companies not owned by shareholders but by their members. The establishment of the Rochdale Principles, formulated by a society of weavers in 1844, marked a key moment in the history of cooperatives. The International Cooperative Alliance adopted these operating principles, which still guide cooperatives globally:

1. Voluntary and Open Membership

2. Democratic Member Control

3. Member Economic Participation

4. Autonomy and Independence

5. Education, Training, and Information

6. Cooperation among Cooperatives

7. Concern for Community

While these operating principles have evolved over the last two centuries, they could easily have been formulated by some DAOs today. The principles of Voluntary and Open Membership, Member Economic Participation, and Concern for Community translate to the examples of DAOs above. The principles of Autonomy and Independence and Cooperation among Cooperatives are key for DAOs to flourish as multi-organizational networks, strengthening an autonomous social sector built through cross-DAO collaboration.

DAOs could set more thoughtful norms around democratic member control, which cooperatives typically define as one member, one vote. Most DAOs employ token voting, that is, one token, one vote. DAOs reason that token ownership represents stakeholdership, with the token model often directly economically tied to the DAO, for example through fees on software protocols it owns. This allows DAO members with greater financial stake to have proportionally greater influence. Token voting does not directly contradict cooperative principles, as there are some cooperatives that weight votes by qualities such as production (15). In certain cases this may feel apt, but as some DAOs evolve toward maintaining basic infrastructure such inequality becomes clearly undesirable. In part, this is because not all stakeholders have the purchasing power representative of their stake, and their practical knowledge may be excluded from governance. This should be solved by shifting the culture toward more decision making mechanisms that decouple economic interest from governance rights.

Until then, projects such as Tornado Cash privacy protocol have approached this distribution problem by retroactively sending tokens to prior users, in a step toward making users stakeholders of the protocol (16). The Regen Network project, a public blockchain for ecosystem services, takes another approach to this distribution problem. They have set aside 30% of their tokens for land stewards, climate scientists, and other stakeholders in regenerative land management to form community DAOs that participate in network governance. Because tokens can be distributed more easily than traditional corporate interests, memberships, or shares, this creates the possibility for a new form of token holder company, which can incorporate deeper practical knowledge in governance without increasing operational transaction costs. Stakeholders with practical knowledge, or “tacit” knowledge, like land stewards in the case of Regen Network, benefit governance by incorporating informal practices in decision making. Here, DAOs begin to introduce new dimensions that exceed what the operating principles of a digital cooperative notionally encompass. For this reason, as much innovation and emphasis should be placed on token distribution mechanisms that identify broader stakeholder participation as on decision making mechanisms.

The tokenization of online communities could be the subject of a longer debate. Far from the best answer to the social media woes of web 2.0, tokenization introduces more awareness of financialized relations. As a guiding star, web3 applications could aim to introduce value in relations which have been historically denied it, such as labor and environment, rather than creating new financialized relations. In this context, for DAOs with the mission of economic value creation, a token becomes a useful mechanism on three fronts:

1. Bootstrapping Funding

2. Distributing Governance Rights

3. Aligning Ecosystem of DAOs

Tokenization introduces a powerful cultural norm into early stage organizations: the expectation of transparent co-ownership of its assets from the start. The tension between more traditional corporate structures that pay dividends and DAOs persists (17). Because most DAOs represent governance rights through a token, in some sense tokens have the ability to Trojan horse principles of cooperatives directly into highly financialized spaces. These are two important sides of, quite literally, one coin, and for this reason, tokenization should not be dismissed. Tokens may be one key to unlock the ownership economy, but to reach a more equitable version of this future, we must participate in crafting the culture around token distribution, mediation, and governance now. This becomes important because, unlike shares in cooperatives, many tokens that double as governance rights can be sold on secondary markets. While this makes the conditions for entrance into an organization easier, DAOs can learn from cooperatives’ emphasis on long termism, through establishing more cultural patterns around token vesting, limited transferability, or more experimental mechanisms.

Just as DAOs can learn from case studies of cooperatives, in a two-way exchange DAOs could introduce more forms of decentralized governance into cooperatives. This is the case made by Morshed Mannan in Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project, which cites how cooperatives often face “coordination problems as the entity scales across borders,” with a “negative trend in participatory management, mutual monitoring, and solidarity” as they internationalize. Dilemmas that cooperatives face, such as funding, governance, and alignment across jurisdictions, DAOs directly address. Embracing cooperativism as a protocol rather than as a corporate structure, DAOs could, in their neologism, encourage a cultural space that can be crafted beyond traditional divides.

The Guilded Age

kara ✿

@karakittel

for people new to the Web 3 space, a “DAO” is a new model of organization that builds on the successes of Neopets crime rings

213

1:46 PM • Jun 14, 2021

As much as DAOs may accidentally embrace the operating principles of cooperatives preceding them, they also slyly resemble enclaves from other online cultures. They have the most to learn from guilds in massively multiplayer online games (MMOs).

As role playing computer games went online in the 1990s, this meant large numbers of players could share in one game world: an environment with a diverse array of objectives, activities, and subplots. Early integral examples of MMOs include The Realm Online, Ultima Online, and EverQuest, which lead to more classics like World of Warcraft and EVE Online. In many of these examples, players are mostly free to set their own goals loosely guided by the open game world narrative, affordances, and risks (18), and because of this narrative freedom, players form groups to accomplish common goals out of the reach of single players. Referred to broadly as guilds, clans, or alliances, these groups can range from 40 to 1000 participants, and their goals could include defeating difficult enemies or constructing useful tools.

To accomplish these goals, cultural patterns emerge in guilds, and there can sometimes be a mismatch between the tools game world developers release for guilds and their actual needs. In an example from EVE Online, the game world developers created an interface for players to create corporations that allowed players to distribute shares. In practice, this feature to distribute shares was rarely used because it did not enhance existing cultural patterns. Instead, using EVE Online’s in-game browser and data API, many guilds developed their own tools needed to accomplish specific goals (19). A parallel between gaming guilds and DAOs could be drawn here, as the current wave of DAOs tend to use a combination of composable tools, such as bridging the Snapshot voting platform to a Gnosis Safe multi-signature account, rather than platforms which overly anticipate use cases for participants.

jin

@dankvr

The first DEX

2,110

12:21 PM • Apr 24, 2021

Though the specific feature to distribute corporate shares may not have taken off in EVE Online, gaming guilds frequently embrace economic practices of redistribution. The vast importance of MMO marketplaces, from Varrock to gold farming, for decentralized finance will be the subject of a later essay, but one economic practice may be keenly relevant for DAOs: Dragon-kill points (DKP). Taking their name historically from when dragons were the most frequently encountered enemies in MMOs, DKP emerged as an allocation system within and sometimes across guilds.

Complex, sustained missions undertaken by guilds, such as killing a dragon, are usually referred to as raids, and can range in length from several hours to several days. At the end of a raid, the slain enemy drops in-game items called loot, and guilds must decide how to distribute it. Because guilds require diverse and complementary player skill sets over extended time periods, “It matters that the same people work together again” (20) and it’s important that guilds distribute loot in a way that members perceive as fair. As guilds grow in maturity, they often evolve different systems of loot distribution, for example beginning with random distribution, moving toward random distribution weighted by participation, and commonly arriving at distribution through an informal scoring system such as DKP. DKP act as a private money system, separate from existing currency in a game world, and guild members earn them based on their participation in raids (21). Guild members can then choose to spend these points in exchange for loot after a raid.

Initially designed by a guild in 1999 for the EverQuest MMO, the practice of DKP has been embraced by many guilds across many game worlds, albeit with slight adjustments. Ed Castranova and Joshua Fairfield detailed one example in Dragon Kill Points: A Summary Whitepaper: the Leftovers DKP system, which maximizes the number of participants in the system not being tied to one specific guild. As Castranova and Fairfield write, “Indeed, this organization is effectively the highest allocative body in the population. If there is an emergent government on [the World of Warcraft server] Silver Hand, it is The Leftovers.” The Leftovers DKP system arises from a few limitations: loot can only be picked up at the aftermath of battle and, in World of Warcraft, cannot be transferred between players. The Leftovers DKP system has a small group of informally appointed governors: players who laboriously, through public dialogue, set and maintain a database of loot item prices in DKP. When loot drops, players with DKP can choose to spend them for a specific item, with all bids and transactions public. Being zero sum, the Leftovers DKP system then equally distributes spent DKP points to all other guild members that participated in the raid.

As Castranova and Fairfield note, DKP supplements the existing currencies of a game world, as much for efficient allocation as for social cohesion, “making possible the exchange of time (spent on those raids in which an individual is not compensated) for goods (obtained on those raids in which an individual wins loot)” (22). Especially in the case of World of Warcraft, because loot cannot be transferred between players, having loot also serves a strong signalling function itself, showing a player has meaningfully participated in raids over time. This DKP system precedes the mechanics of DAO platforms in development today, such as Aragon, Colony, and DAOstack, which all offer mechanisms to distribute reputational tokens based on the participation of members, who are rewarded for successful proposals, grants, or campaigns: what might be called raids in other game worlds. These reputational tokens complement other economic systems enabled by DAO platforms, such as DAO-specific tokens or other assets in their multi-signature account treasuries. Often used as an alternative model to the plutocratic one token, one vote model, reputational tokens, earned through participation rather than purchasing power, provide greater voting power in DAOs that amasses over time. DAOs can learn from DKP, which in contrast, acts as a private money system based on participation that can be spent on other digital assets, instead of only amassing over time.

In addition to efficient allocation, contextual reputation, and signalling functions, the DKP system holds another significance for DAOs: generally all guilds resolve disputes independently from traditional court systems, despite these disputes involving expensive stakes. This becomes highly relevant for DAO tooling like Aragon’s digital jurisdictions or Kleros’s decentralized arbitration service that aim to provide internet native dispute resolution tools. In fact, DAO tooling often tries to technically solve problems that gaming guilds have already culturally refined for several decades, and it may be time for DAOs and gaming guilds to merge their practical knowledge more closely.

Another subtle cultural pattern of gaming guilds relates to their articulated economic structure. As researcher Joshua Citarella points out, many DKP systems resemble a form of market socialism, in which goods are publicly owned but allocated by markets (23). Citarella also goes on to note that despite the resemblance of DKP systems to market socialism, and the general happiness of players who participate in them, many of those players would decidedly not politically embrace the label market socialism. Shadow economics may be an apt term for when a group operates through an economic form it would not label itself as: DAOs as cooperative protocols and gaming guilds as market socialism. This tendency leaves interesting political territory like gaming guilds underexplored, because gaming guilds do not often need to wear their own flags. In one light, this could be more of a feature than a bug, as the invention of new terms like DAO, rather than reliance on canon, in part fuels their enthusiastic embrace.

Josh | ⬛🟥⬛

@TBSocialist

We should be building organizing platforms owned by users and workers where it doesn't matter that someone tweets something that you might disagree with but whether or not they are helping us reach concrete political objectives

32

9:25 AM • Jun 8, 2021

While it may result in ignoring their prehistory, DAOs still retain a powerful ambiguity, in which their burgeoning political ambitions do not yet possess fully familiar aesthetic articulations. This could be co-opted toward several different ends. For example, one could imagine a DAO whose treasury self-destructs, like terra0's NFT, when global temperatures rise over 2 degrees Celsius, accompanied by a sparkly, unassuming mascot avatar.

Such a DAO might attract participation from those not drawn to the familiar green aesthetics of most climate initiatives, and it could have the effect of broadening participation in a political objective through creating new cultures around it. The momentum of the questionably new can always be good for something, and the question becomes how to cultivate DAOs that can build surreptitious solidarity across ideological divides.

A Constellation is Born

While a comprehensive prehistory of decentralized autonomous organizations could take us much further into the past (24), many proponents of DAOs have a core belief about their impact on the future: DAOs could out-compete by out-cooperating the modern firm.

In the twentieth century, many economists asked why companies arose when services priced by the market should, in theory, be more efficient. Ronald Coase explored the answer to this question in The Nature of the Firm, coming to the conclusion that markets create unaccounted for transaction costs. These transaction costs could arise from price discovery, contract negotiation, or onboarding for a service, which can be mitigated by retaining services in a company. Following from this theory, the size of firms may have practical limits they won’t exceed, because eventually transaction costs increase through developments like departmental bureaucracy. Though this theory has many critiques, the promise of DAOs can be positioned in relation to it: DAOs aspire to become more efficient as they scale (25). While in practice this aspiration has been far from proven, in some respects the promise of DAOs lies in using technical governance protocols to reduce transaction costs. To return to an example above, DAO tooling like Gnosis Safe enables pseudonymous groups, across jurisdictions, to pool and manage funds within minutes. The equivalent process to establish a traditional joint bank account could take months, and in some cases, it wouldn’t be possible for individuals from different jurisdictions to jointly manage a bank account. Through the affordances of public blockchains, DAOs can incorporate deeper practical knowledge in governance without increasing operational transaction costs: aspiring to become “more efficient” as they scale.

While DAO tooling like Gnosis Safe enables this today, overall the promise of infinitely scalable organizations still has a long way to go. Often even the promise of DAOs can obscure their utility in practice. In The Dissensus Protocol: Governing Differences in Online Peer Communities, Jaya Klara Brekke, Kate Beecroft, and Francesca Pick focus on a case study of the Genesis DAO, a collective centered around the DAOstack platform. They write:

The Genesis DAO is a good example of a unique trait common to many DAOs, namely, that they comprise highly motivated groups that have formed around a set of ideas about governance, rather than governance being a means in order to achieve some shared mission. In other words, it was tool-centric and focused on one main action: allocating funds to proposals. It is unusual for people who are strangers to start making financial decisions together immediately without having time to develop coherence and trust. And this was in fact the very promise of projects like the Genesis DAO: that the technology would bypass the need to develop trusted relationships, meaning thousands of people would be able to coalesce around objectives, take actions, and even spend money together as a group (26).

Much like the earlier example above of EVE Online players not using the interface to distribute corporate shares released by the game developers, tool-centric development, as well as the assumption that tools automatically create useful cultural patterns, must be reconsidered. Rather than technical protocols for governance that diminish the need for trusted relationships, DAOs can be approached through iteratively developing highly composable tools to coordinate across different levels of coherence and trust. Ultimately, the efficiency DAOs aspire to may not be defined as an economic function but as a matter of “better,” situated governance: one supported by deeper practical knowledge within an infinite game.

Layers of the DAO

DAOs will not be the uniformly non-hierarchical networks some imagine. Instead, DAOs coordinate across different levels of coherence and trust. In Ownership in Cryptonetworks, Patrick Rawson argues that for DAOs, “distributing ownership to squadlike entities with more specialized objectives is the key long-term problem to solve” in order to enable meaningful work. These “squadlike entities” are smaller teams with trust relationships, perhaps not unlike the gaming guilds in the examples above, which execute on value aligned missions with DAOs. At a closer look, effective DAOs start behaving much more like networks of teams, like the MONDRAGON Corporation network with 100 affiliated cooperatives, rather than the loosely coordinated swarm intelligence that they might appear as from a distance. Inspired by Rawson’s analysis, we can roughly sketch three layers of a DAO:

1. Token: Multi-organizational networks aligned by token ownership

2. Teams: Teams, guilds, and squads represented by token ownership

3. Missions: Missions, milestones, and raids financed by token ownership

From these layers, a heterarchical network emerges, meaning an organization that possesses the ability to be ranked in multiple ways.

In ecosystems that prioritize distributing ownership, tokens encourage DAO networks to be managed by their members. Tokens, teams, and missions are not confined to the quasi-institutional boundaries of a single DAO but can and, in order to meaningfully decentralize the control network, should be represented by token ownership in multiple DAOs. An ecosystem not unlike the control networks of transnational corporations emerges, but importantly, one without monocentric command and with reduced transaction costs across different levels of trust. As Rawson writes, “As long as the collective memory freely circulates within a given [DAO network], discovered solutions to problems can be reused.” When we view DAOs as multi-organizational networks aligned by token ownership, the purpose of DAO tooling becomes not only to support the operations of one team but to facilitate collaborations across many. Funded by PrimeDAO, DAO-to-DAO (D2D) collaboration mechanisms appear the most forward thinking work along these lines, which may eventually overtake traditional business-to-business (B2B) products. A new squadlike entity emerging from stealth mode, the Gnosis Guild team embraces a similar emphasis on DAO-to-DAO tools, with a new constellation of DAO tools called Zodiac.

Revisiting the promise of DAOs, their potential to incorporate deeper practical knowledge in governance does not mean that decision making must involve an ever-larger number of members in every proposal, but rather that within a DAO network, teams who possess the most relevant expertise can easily share it with the ecosystem. When we view DAOs as constellations of teams, not monoliths, DAOs become networks to allow collective memory to flow freely.

The Networks to Come

The TIMN RAND report this essay began with closes on a curious note. It reads:

Much of the literature about redesigning organizations for the information-age focuses on production—on improving productivity, or manufacturing something new like the Boeing 777 jetliner. Yet, does this not reflect a lingering industrial-age mentality? Production organizations remain a crucial part of the organizational ecology. However, we should also be thinking about “sensory organizations.” Sensory functions are quite different from production functions, and require different modes of organization—e.g., more networks connected to the world outside an office’s boundaries. Determining appropriate designs for all manner of sensory organizations may become a good meta-theme for innovative research and development in the years ahead (27).

This closing sentiment echoes the popularity in that era of the twentieth century media theorist Marshall McLuhan, who emphasized how digital media impacts our sensory nervous systems. If digitally prime networks like DAOs operate on our nervous system first, it does not mean they won’t come to reorganize, reshape, and redistribute our material world. Some still refuse to take seriously the fact that cooperative principles, gaming guilds, and odd imaginaries like DAOs present an emergent organizational form with legitimate political relevance. We must take them politically seriously now, so that they don’t remain shaped only by those on one side of the digital divide. The days of DAOs versus PACs, political action committees that fundraise for electoral candidates in the United States, will be with us soon. Just as markets did not make states obsolete, but diminished some of their operations while strengthening others, DAOs introduce new forms into traditional political participation that emerge from the autonomous social sector: the network union.

To call attention to the chimeric’s term failings at seriousness, many return to its misnomer: the “A” in DAO does not live up to the meaning of autonomous; while others like researcher Aude Launay invoke the political, rather than the technical, spirit of autonomy in DAOs. Even though the term DAO remains poetically correct, we could propose an occasional replacement: decentralized avatar organizations. Such organizations would take their political stakes both lightly and heavily. As poetitician and Digital Minister of Taiwan Audrey Tang notes, the days of avatar politicians are already here (28). Avatar politicians are virtual beings that represent, rally, and advocate on behalf of political platforms, and when automation increases, they may even spawn their own political platforms. A decentralized avatar organization would recognize the coming virtual zeitgeist: this could look like a collectively managed cyborg like Lil Miquela or an entire environment shaped by members, like Trust’s moving castles. Decentralized avatar organizations will have collectively developed, interoperable game worlds, engines, or virtual being mascots at their core, which co-creates the culture around which their members organize.

By learning from their prehistory, DAOs can move towards a syncretic theory of organizations, meaning a theory which incorporates a wide range of cultural patterns, practices, and influences while recognizing its inherited political biases. To escape the tendency to fetishize technical protocols for governance, decentralized avatar organizations must cultivate compelling environments players want to inhabit, recognizing narratives, aesthetics, and goals held in common are key to their success. Making the internet a place not only for transactions but for relationships and thought itself, as Barlow wrote, relies on the depth of these narratives. As is the case with massively multiplayer online games, DAOs are less technical protocols for governance and more high stakes game worlds that interweave.

We should aim for rough consensus and running worlds.

This essay is the second in a Gnosis Guild series by @keikreutler bridging cryptonetworks, web3, and gaming.

Join the Gnosis Guild Discord today to continue the conversation.

Cover Image: Leonora Carrington, El mundo mágico de los mayas (1964) meets CLIP. Many thanks to Mat Dryhurst for the assist.

Deepest thanks for feedback while developing this essay to Other Internet Peer Review: Toby Shorin, Sam Hart, Laura Lotti, Bryan Lehrer, Jay Springett, Arthur Röing Baer, John Palmer, Callil Capuozzo, Tom Critchlow, and Kara Kittel as well as Auryn Macmillan, Sam Panter, Patrick Rawson, Scott Moore, Wassim Alsindi, and Brett Scott.

[1]: “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace”, John Perry Barlow, 1996: https://www.eff.org/de/cyberspace-independence[2]: “Paul Baran and the Origins of the Internet”: https://www.rand.org/about/history/baran.list.html[3]: “Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution”, David Ronfeldt, RAND Corporation, 1995: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7967.html[4]: Ibid[5]: Post-Capitalist Society, Peter F. Drucker, HarperCollins Publishers, 1993 (171)[6]: “Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution”, David Ronfeldt, RAND Corporation, 1995: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7967.html[7]: “The Digital Dictatorship”, Evgeny Morozov, 2010: https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703983004575073911147404540[8]: Notably, at the time, The DAO was nearly the largest crowdfunding campaign in history, second only to the in-development, massively multiplayer online game Star Citizen.[9] “Scissor Labels”, John Palmer, 2021: https://j.mirror.xyz/RUeJfZEZxr-hkuzUCakQyUuf2kOJVMPPiAWBaQFhhqc[10]: “Many-Headed Hydras: DAOs in the Art World”, Aude Launay, Penny Rafferty, and Ruth Catlow, 2020: https://so-far.online/many-headed-hydras/[11]: “The Wyoming DAO bill, DAO art collections, Autonomous DAOs, DAO templates and more DAOs with Priyanka Desai & Aaron Wright of OpenLaw”, Interdependence, 2021: https://www.patreon.com/posts/wyoming-dao-bill-51387956[12]: “PleasrDAO’s $5.5M purchase of Edward Snowden’s genesis NFT.”, Lindsay Howard and Jamis Johnson, 2021: https://foundation.app/blog/pleasrdao[13]: “DAO Ecosystem Overview”, Deep DAO, 2021: https://deepdao.io/#/deepdao/dashboard [14]: “Cooperative identity, values & principle”, International Cooperative Alliance, 2021: https://www.ica.coop/en/cooperatives/cooperative-identity[15]: “Fostering Worker Cooperatives with Blockchain Technology: Lessons from the Colony Project”, Morshed Mannan, 2018: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3356774[16]: “Tornado.Cash Governance Proposal”, 2020: https://tornado-cash.medium.com/tornado-cash-governance-proposal-a55c5c7d0703[17]: “DAOs, DACs, DAs and More: An Incomplete Terminology Guide”, Vitalik Buterin, 2014: https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/05/06/daos-dacs-das-and-more-an-incomplete-terminology-guide/[18]: “Sandbox game”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandbox_game[19] Virtual Economies, Vili Lehdonvirta and Edward Castronova, MIT Press, 2014 (159) [20]: “Dragon Kill Points: A Summary Whitepaper”, Edward Castronova and Joshua Fairfield, 2007: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=958945[21]: Ibid [22]: Ibid [23]: “Memes as Politics: Ep 13: DKP is Market Socialism”, Joshua Citarella, 2021: https://soundcloud.com/joshuacitarella/memes-as-politics-ep-13-dkp-is-market-socialism[24]: One account of the prehistory of DAOs could begin with the Rule of Saint Benedict: “a book of precepts written for monks living communally under the authority of an abbot.” Written in 516 AD, the Rule of Saint Benedict acted as a social protocol that spawned a decentralized network of autonomous monasteries. [25]: “dxDAO: Toward super-scalable organizations”, 2019: https://github.com/gnosis/dx-daostack/blob/master/dxdao_whitepaper_v1.pdf[26]: “The Dissensus Protocol: Governing Differences in Online Peer Communities”, Jaya Klara Brekke, Kate Beecroft, and Francesca Pick, 2021: https://frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fhumd.2021.641731/full[27]: “Tribes, Institutions, Markets, Networks: A Framework About Societal Evolution”, David Ronfeldt, RAND Corporation, 1995: https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P7967.html[28]: “Radical Transparency, humor > disinformation, poetry for machines, avatar politicians and giving non-human entities a vote with Digital Minister of Taiwan Audrey Tang”, Interdependence, 2021: https://interdependence.fm/episodes/radical-transparency-humor-disinformation-poetry-for-machines-avatar-politicians-and-giving-non-human-entities-a-vote-with-digital-minister-of-taiwan-audrey-tang-X36XnWVg