In our previous article, we explained that the real problem in DAOs is the Delegation Trilemma: a fundamental tradeoff between effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and hardness that every DAO must navigate.

The Real Problem with DAOs

Hats Protocol

Oct 29, 2025

Internet Capital Markets are heating up. The dream of funding internet-native businesses is back! But here’s the trillion dollar question: Once the project is funded, what is the best way to apply the...

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The question is: how do we make optimal delegations in the face of these tradeoffs?

The answer, we believe, lies in two breakthrough technologies that are fundamentally changing what's possible:

1. AI — drastically changing the tradeoff between effectiveness and cost, but introduces alignment risk when we delegate to it

2. Programmable Hardness — allowing us to apply the automation and flexibility gains from AI to the hardness dimension itself

When combined, these technologies go beyond the existing Pareto frontier. They push the frontier outward and enable combinations of effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and hardness that were previously impossible.

But to actually leverage these technologies in practice, we need a comprehensive framework of delegation that we can encode in smart contracts.

To that end, today we are introducing the Trust Zones Framework.

The framework is a programmatic approach to designing optimal delegations. You identify which tradeoffs matter most, then systematically design delegations that optimize for your goals.

Most importantly, because the framework is designed to be encoded into smart contracts, it turns organizational design into programmable infrastructure. Now, you can create, nest, and dynamically adjust delegations with the speed and precision of software.

What is a Trust Zone?

A trust zone is a programmable container for delegation.

Instead of delegating directly to an agent, you delegate into a zone that defines precisely what the agent can do and under what conditions you can trust them to do it. The principal remains outside the zone, while the agent operates within it.

The key question becomes: what are the specific levers you can pull to construct a trust zone? What dimensions can you actually configure?

Across both its boundary and contents, every trust zone is defined by seven configurable parameters. These parameters and the specific mechanisms that create them, map the entire design space for delegation. They are the comprehensive toolkit for trust zone design.

The Seven Dimensions

Each parameter has an impact on the overall Delegation Trilemma properties of the zone. Ownership alignment, for example, tends to increase both effectiveness and hardness, but at higher cost. Adding a higher-threshold decision model increases hardness but may decrease effectiveness.

The power of having all seven parameters to play with is that you can select exactly the mix that results in the properties you need for each specific delegation.

The Power of Programmable Delegation

The ability to program delegation like software has three big implications for building better organizations:

First: Granular control. Depending on the thresholds in the trilemma dimensions you need to hit, you can combine the effects of any or all of the hardness-building parameters in a variety of configurations.

Second: Nesting. You can nest trust zones to break down larger responsibilities into smaller, specialized zones with tailored parameters. Since hardness prevents risk from flowing up the delegation tree, nesting improves aggregate effectiveness and cost for the same level of hardness.

Third: Multiple agent types. You can select from different types of agents while remaining inside the same cryptoeconomic safeguards:

• Human agents bring creativity and judgment, but require more hardness

• Group agents (multisigs, DAOs) combine expertise with collective decision-making, reducing capture risk while maintaining flexibility

• Smart contract agents can self-constrain and are perfect for managing other trust zones, implementing algorithmic decisions, or leveraging the intelligence of markets

• AI agents offer major cost savings, though their alignment uncertainty may require additional hardness parameters

Reducing the Cost of Delegation Itself

The process of designing and implementing each delegation is itself costly. By encoding trust-building mechanisms directly into smart contracts, we transform hardness from a bespoke, labor-intensive process into reusable, composable infrastructure.

Once a mechanism is built (like voting systems, timelocks, spending limits) it can be deployed instantly and combined with other mechanisms.

Hardness becomes a zero-marginal-cost building block.

Hats Protocol v1 served as a great start to this, making roles and permissions programmable and composable. The next step is to fully protocolize the Trust Zones Framework itself, creating factories and APIs to deploy all of the mechanisms that instantiate the seven framework parameters.

The result is that the implementation cost of hardness approaches zero, while its reliability remains absolute.

On the AI side, we’ve already talked about using AI agents within these hard organizational structures to automate work, getting significantly lower costs without needing to give up hardness.

The next advancement is to leverage AI to bring down the costs of delegation itself. Now we can reap the benefits of AI for reducing both the cost of executing work and the cost of designing how to delegate it.

The Compounding Effect

These two breakthroughs multiply each other's impact. Programmable hardness makes delegation cheap to implement, but only if you know what to implement. AI makes delegation cheap to design, but only if there's infrastructure to deploy the designs into.

Together, they create a flywheel: AI designs increasingly sophisticated delegations because the infrastructure can support them, while the infrastructure becomes more powerful because AI can fully leverage its composability. Organizations can iterate at software speed, optimizing continuously rather than settling for "good enough."

Where before you might create 5-10 delegations for your entire DAO, you can now create hundreds of precisely-tuned trust zones with minimal overhead.

This is how DAOs go from theoretically interesting but practically limited, to genuinely competitive with traditional organizations: by making it cheap enough to optimize every single delegation.

Introducing Gardnr

To put this framework into practice, we're launching Gardnr, a custom AI agent built specifically for designing and implementing trust zones.

Named after the solution to coordination from Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch," Gardnr is trained on our learnings from working on Hats Protocol for the last 3.5 years, including inspiration from our organizational design work with EigenLayer, Maker, Safe, zkSync and more.

Gardnr can:

• Help you understand and apply the Trust Zones Framework

• Analyze your existing organization to identify the trust zones you already have

• Design brand new trilemma-optimized trust zones tailored to your needs

• Output them in YAML files ready for deployment

• Soon: automatically deploy them to your blockchain of choice

Gardnr also references publicly available DAO proposals from the Ethereum ecosystem and is powered by Claude 4.5. It will rapidly improve with usage and feedback.

Conclusion

We've presented the Trust Zones Framework; a comprehensive, programmatic approach to solving the Delegation Trilemma.

Where the Trilemma showed us the real problem with DAOs, Trust Zones gives us the tools to actually solve it.

By combining two frontier-expanding technologies—AI and programmable hardness—and giving ourselves a rigorous framework for leveraging them, we can build organizations that are harder, more effective, and more cost efficient than ever before.

Now it's time to put theory into practice. Try designing a new trust zone with Gardnr and give us feedback. If you're interested in applying the Trust Zones Framework to your organization, get in touch.

The future of organizations is programmable. Let's build it together.

But here’s the trillion dollar question:

Once the project is funded, what is the best way to apply the capital toward achieving its mission?

Well, if you want a typical startup risk-return profile, you'd probably plow the funds into the founders’ bank account or multisig and hope for the best.

But as we’ve seen over and over again, that doesn’t usually work out too well…

Rune

@RuneCrypto_

it's actually so crazy, $LMTS

> Limitless Team moved 5 million coins to a wallet
> finally finished dumping it all for 2.3m profit over the last few hours
> relief bounce, people think it's finally over
> nope, transfer in another 10 million tokens and immediately continue the

365

11:11 AM • Oct 22, 2025

On the other hand, if you are one of the few decentralization purists left, you might try starting a DAO and giving real smart contract-enforced ownership of the project to tokenholders.

And inevitably everyone would look at you like you have three heads because we all know that "DAOs don’t work."

...but could they?

We’ve been grinding for years to figure this out. We think there’s one key insight that might help us all get to the root of all these failures over the last ten years.

Ameen Soleimani

@ameensol

my friends spent 7 years in the DAO gulags to bring you fully functional no code organizations

coordination is our religion

spengrah.eth

@spengrah

i just deployed an entire organization, complete with robust roles, resource management capabilities, operational and compliance controls, and much more in a single no-code tx

it is onchain, unstoppable and self-enforcing

all for ~$80 on ethereum L1, and <50 cents on L2

AMA

121

3:29 PM • Jan 10, 2025

The Surface Problem

It starts out like this:

“DAOs don’t work because voter turnout is too low.”

Well that’s a symptom, not the root problem. Voter turnout is low because most of the votes don’t really matter… Then you arrive at:

“DAOs don’t work because voting is the wrong decision-making mechanism for most decisions.”

Okay, that’s interesting. Well then what is the right mechanism for making each decision? When should you use DAO votes, versus the wide range of other possible options? Is there a principled way to approach this?

This question is where the Hats Protocol project began going down the rabbit hole 3.5 years ago.

Hats Protocol 🧢🎩👒

@hatsprotocol

Introducing

HATS PROTOCOL

A new protocol for flexible & composable DAO-native roles ("hats") represented as NFTs

Using Hats, DAOs can:
- delegate & revoke authorities
- hold contributors accountable
- create role legibility

179

10:18 AM • Jun 13, 2022

The Key Insight

We’ve written a lot about our learnings over the years. But to save you some time, here are the big ideas:

1. DAO voting gives us capture-resistance. The democracy at the top level of the DAO is an absolute necessity in order to maintain capture resistance, and align the platform creators, investors, and users so that nobody gets screwed over.

spengrah.eth

@spengrah

ANTICAPTURE

A framework for capture-resistant governance

(an introduction)

mirror.xyz/hq.spengrah.et…

264

12:59 PM • Feb 4, 2022

This is essentially what is different about Web3, and why there is any hope at all in this approach for slaying moloch, solving alignment, and creating a user-owned internet that is fundamentally different from the maximally extractive landscape we have today.

2. DAO votes have very high costs. While the DAO’s democracy is very useful, it is extremely expensive to use. For this reason, we need to minimize its usage while ensuring it is always available as the last line of defense in decision-making and resource allocation in the organization.

3. The DAO must delegate to practically achieve its goals. Any time you want to have a decision made by a body other than the full DAO, you are delegating. (Not the “delegate your airdropped tokens and never look at them again” delegation we’re all too familiar with. We mean the operational delegation of specific work and responsibilities by the whole DAO to other contributors.)

Delegation introduces the principal-agent problem, or the problem of ensuring the body acting on behalf of the full DAO actually acts in alignment with the DAO’s best interests.

A counterexample of this would be: dumping 25% of the org’s treasury into Day 1 post-TGE hype.

But what’s unique about blockchains is that we have smart contract-based hardness as a building block to consider in the design of our delegation systems.

Josh Stark (0xstark.eth)

@0xstark

0. Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

This is my answer to why crypto matters, what problem blockchains solve, and how Ethereum can change the world.

stark.mirror.xyz

Atoms, Institutions, Blockchains

What do we want our civilization to be made of?

758

10:00 AM • Apr 13, 2022

So if you want to have the founding team do “onchain market-making,” you could transparently deploy a smart contract that had specific buy and sell constraints, preventing them from self-dealing without you needing to trust them.

4. Delegation in DAOs creates a trilemma. What you end up with, as you break this down, is a series of tradeoffs between these three dimensions. You want to maximize effectiveness of decisions, while minimizing costs (moving away from full DAO votes), but without giving up hardness (reliable commitments to take aligned actions). And any action you take to gain more of one dimension makes tradeoffs against the others.

The Delegation Trilemma

That’s it! This is the real problem with DAOs.

Every time a DAO (or a set of tokenholders) wants to accomplish something, they must delegate. And by doing so, they must make a series of tradeoffs within this design space.

Of course, you will want to make the best possible tradeoffs for each decision you are making. One of these tradeoffs is how much effort to spend on optimizing the delegations. The act of delegation (designing the delegation, making tradeoffs, and actually implementing it with smart contracts), is itself costly.

As the technology for delegation improves, this cost will decrease, and the delegations (and therefore entire DAOs) will become more optimized over time.

The Trilemma in Action

Through this lens, everything we’ve seen unfold in crypto makes so much more sense:

1. Bitcoin. Bitcoin intentionally made it very hard to change how it works in order to be resilient to attacks, corruption, and misalignment. Low effectiveness, high hardness.

It is extremely expensive to operate Bitcoin. But it turned out the that extreme value of hard money made it so that Bitcoin as a distributed organization had enough resources to pay that high cost.

2. Real DeFi DAOs. Similarly, Aave, Maker, and Lido succeeded as DAOs precisely because they operate in markets where users are willing to pay a premium for hardness.

However, there is a lot more going on technically, so these organizations have to manage a lot more complexity in their operations. Because of the premium, these organizations had enough resources to make the tradeoff of paying very high costs in order to achieve both effectiveness and hardness and in their operations.

3. ICO + Founders in Labs Corp. This is the common alternative to DAOing, which roughly results in entrenched and powerful founders with stodgy, static community committees. "We can't actually be decentralized because we won't be able to get anything done." Medium to high effectiveness and low costs, but dangerously low hardness.

4. Facebook/Meta. If you broaden your aperture a bit, you can even look at traditional companies through this lens, considering the mechanisms they use for hardness (institutions, legal systems, and state monopoly on violence) in place of smart contracts.

Facebook/Meta exemplifies traditional company optimization where Zuck maintained near-total control from startup to public corporation, establishing high effectiveness culture ("move fast and break things") while screwing over employees, users, and platform developers. Despite the legal contracts in place, in practice, the hardness is relatively low.

The Delegation Trilemma is the real problem with DAOs.

We hope this new lens helps the industry makes better sense of the challenges at hand, and helps make the application of funds raised from internet capital markets as strong of an innovation as the upgrades to capital formation itself.

You can now dive into all 6 episodes featuring elite operators from Eigen Foundation, ZK Sync, Optimism, Fileverse, SuperRare, and Lemma.

Ready to binge? Check out the episode guide below ⬇

With Tracheopteryx, Chief Governance Officer at Eigen Foundation

🎧 Spotify 🎧 Apple

Collect the NFT

With Rafa, Governance Lead at ZK Sync Association and guest host Amy Jung, Head of Governance Ops at Eigen Foundation

🎧 Spotify 🎧 Apple

Collect the NFT

With Justine Humenansky, Head of Governance at Optimism Foundation and guest host Amy Jung, Head of Governance Ops at Eigen Foundation

🎧 Spotify 🎧 Apple

Collect the NFT

With Andreas, Founder of Fileverse

🎧 Spotify 🎧 Apple

Collect the NFT

With Dan Hunt, Systems Facilitator at Hats Protocol

🎧 Spotify 🎧 Apple

Collect the NFT

With Brennan Mulligan, Foundation Operator at SuperRare and Karel Olivier, Co-Founder of Lemma

🎧 Spotify 🎧 Apple

Collect the NFT

Thank you to all our amazing guests and to lead host and producer Diana Chen from Rehash. And thank you to all And all Hats Protocol stewards, contributors, community members, and supporters who supported this miniseries and all the work that led up to it!

Hats protoDAO, the decentralizing entity preparing to govern Hats Protocol, recently completed its first onchain game, a murder mystery experience designed to bring people together onchain in an innovative way. The game served two purposes: 1) explore non-skeuomorphic ways for organizations and projects to get things done and build with Hats, and 2) plant the seeds for an eventual Hats “Game Department”. 

Following is a summary of what the game was, how it used Hats, and what’s next for onchain games.

The Hats protoDAO Murder Mystery game brought five contestants together to compete to win a spot on the Rehash podcast by solving a complex mystery in teams. Using a popular murder mystery game as a foundation, the Hats protoDAO team reimagined it to fit an onchain, team-oriented format.

The game began with a Halloween party setting and a shocking crime: the murder of Jules, a longtime friend of the party attendees. While everyone had a motive to want Jules gone, only one person was truly guilty. Each contestant assumed the role of “The Detective,” a character who could recruit and grant "hats" (access) to teammates, enabling a team-based approach to uncovering the murderer.

Teammates, assigned roles like The Psychologist, The Architect, or The Rookie, each received unique, character-specific information about the crime. This information was securely stored on a hat-gated Charmverse page, requiring detectives to recruit seven friends to obtain all the clues needed to solve the case. As teams worked collaboratively to piece together the means, motive, and opportunity, they uncovered the mystery step-by-step.

Congratulations to Andy Boyan from the Last Network for being the first to solve the puzzle and winning our prize! Ady was able to leverage his friends in the Last Network Telegram channel to quickly compile all of the available information. After about 48 hours, Andy tweeted out the correct suspect, their motive, and how they accomplished the dastardly deed. 

Participants praised the game as a fun and engaging way to explore onchain interactivity using Hats Protocol. But this experience raised an important question: why incorporate Hats into games at all?

Hats protoDAO is dedicated to facilitating a decentralized, onchain organization. By developing integrations with various web3 tools, Hats aims to become a fundamental resource for onchain collaboration. The team believes that beyond traditional applications, creative uses of onchain infrastructure will enable web3 to redefine how we live and work together. While Hats can accommodate any organizational structure, it’s the non-skeuomorphic, or novel, applications of onchain tech that truly set web3 apart.

This murder mystery is just the beginning. Hats protoDAO is launching a gaming working group where members are invited to brainstorm, test, and refine different onchain games that utilize Hats. This group plans to experiment with new concepts, like an onchain scavenger hunt where participants must locate individuals based on specific criteria—such as holding a particular NFT, minting a POAP from the merge, or holding a specified amount of tokens.

Another potential game idea involves an escape room, where participants solve puzzles to mint additional hats. Each hat would unlock a new “room” within a Charmverse workspace or give access to files in a Fileverse workspace that contain the next challenge. The objective is to create progressively more complex puzzles, leveraging hats to enhance the immersive experience.

Looking forward, Hats protoDAO envisions the gaming working group evolving into an innovations hub, dedicated to discovering creative applications of Hats Protocol. This could range from simple team-building exercises to complex simulations that bring out the best in people, teams, and entire organizations, both big and small.

Hats protoDAO is excited to keep pushing the boundaries of what's possible with onchain organizations, fostering community, creativity, and collaboration. This is just the start, and we look forward to the many ways we can innovate and play together onchain.

Visit community.hatsprotocol.xyz to join the Hats Community to get involved.

What the protocol does best is still an open inquiry, with some really exciting implementations by top DAOs in the works that we’ll be able to share more about soon. But what the protocol does really well is now quite clear. More DAOs than ever are using Hats to automate onboarding, power elections, and manage permissions across the internet with programmable onchain roles, and four primary use cases have risen to the top, with multiple live examples for each.

They are:

• DAO-Controlled Multisigs & Signers

• Fully Onchain Elections

• Workspace Access Management

• Accountability in Grants Programs

Each of these use cases can be combined with the others, along with any of the other 20+ permissions and accountabilities you can automate with Hats. But for now, we’ll keep things simple and focus on 4 of the most common ways Hats is solving real problems and helping organizations get shit done, with 12 unique examples of Hats in action:

Grant and revoke Safe multisig signing authority for individuals, committees, and councils, increasing security and simplifying role transitions.

As DAOs scale, they often face challenges in securely managing signing authority over their Safe multisigs. This becomes particularly painful during role transitions, when the potential for operational delays and governance risks increase substantially.

Hats enables organizations like Purple, Questbook, and TreasureDAO to securely grant control of funds and contracts to specific individuals, committees, and councils, while retaining the ability to revoke or transfer that authority as needed.

• Securely delegate, revoke, and transfer Safe multisig signing authority‍

• Simplify role transitions to save time

• Automate signing authority based on specific eligibility rules

Specific examples:

1. Questbook is securely managing signing authority across four domains for an Arbitrum grants program (Questbook w/ Arbitrum)*

2. TreasureDAO formed a council with the power to vote on the organization’s behalf in DAO governance (TreasureDAO)

3. Purple is granting its Security Council the ability to veto DAO proposals to protect against governance attacks (Purple)

Learn more about these examples of secure multisig management here.

Transform governance into action with fully onchain elections that automatically grant permissions based on election results, enforce term limits, and hold elected positions accountable.

Governance is at the heart in decentralized organizations, but governance is only as effective as its ability to then turn decisions into action. This is where today’s election systems fall short. 

Hats Protocol, via our integrations with Snapshot, Tally, JokeRace, and Decent, offers a better way to conduct elections for councils, committees, and important roles, fortified with security, permissions, and automation. 

Key features:

• Grant permissions automatically based on election results

• Revoke permissions automatically after terms expire or when individuals are no longer eligible

• Stream compensation to election winners as long as they're holding the role

Specific examples:

4. Purple elected its Grants Chair and Revenue Chair roles through transparent onchain elections (Purple)*

5. DecentDAO enables organizations to appoint roles through DAO governance with built-in compensation using Hats & Sablier (Decent DAO)

6. Premia Finance increased protocol security by enabling token holders to govern the protocol if multisig signers were corrupted or MIA (Premia Finance)

Learn more about these examples of fully onchain elections here.

You can also set additional eligibility rules for roles that are continuously enforced, or build your own and submit it to the Hats modules registry.

Streamline contributor access to workspaces, documents, and communication channels, saving time and reducing manual overhead.

Managing access to workspaces, documents, and communications channels in a growing organization can be a nightmare. With contributors joining and leaving, roles changing, and permissions evolving, it’s easy for things to slip through the cracks. This often results in security risks, inefficiencies, and a lack of accountability.

Hats Protocol automates access management across all levels of your organization. By automatically granting and revoking contributor permissions based on predefined eligibility rules — such as agreements, subscriptions, assets, and more — Hats ensures that only the right people have the right access at the right times, without the need for any centralized oversight or manual verification.

• Automate contributor onboarding and offboarding

• Add subscription or membership-based access to community workspaces and channels

• Ensure transparent and auditable records of contributor access to permissions

Specific examples:

7. Optimism Fractal is creating pathways for contributors to "level up" automatically as they get more involved and accrue reputation (Optimism Fractal)*

8. LEXClinic requires new members to sign an entry agreement in order to access private docs and workspaces (LEXClinic)

9. Unlock Protocol enables organizations to provide subscription-based access or charge a membership fee to claim specific roles and access their permissions (Unlock Protocol)

Learn more about these examples of automated workspace access management here.

And see the docs for the full list of permissions and authorities that can be accessed via Hats:

Build a better grants program from start to finish, from transparent committee elections to streamlined review permissions to secure fund distribution.

Many DAO grants programs struggle with fragmented permissions, unclear responsibilities, and inefficient fund management. These issues often result in a lack of accountability, compliance problems, and difficulties in managing grants programs effectively, leading to wasted resources and huge operational costs.

Hats Protocol provides organizations with a better way to manage their grants program from start to finish: hold transparent committee elections, give committee members the multisig signing authorities they need, simplify permissions across the review process, and hold both committee members and grantees accountable to their commitments.

• Delegate, revoke, and transfer control over grants distributions safely

• Give grants committee members multisig signing authority & access to different stages of the grant review process

• Easily transfer roles and permissions across the review process from one grants round to another

Specific examples:

10. RareDAO is giving its grants committee the ability to allocate funds on the organization's behalf while holding them accountable to their commitments (RareDAO Grants Committee)

11. Grant Ships has developed a competitive grant allocation game for the Arbitrum ecosystem where multiple groups compete to best allocate funds within a given domain (Grant Ships w/ Arbitrum)

12. RareDAO has simplified the grants review process with role-based permissions for its grants committee members, grants chair, and foundation operator roles (RareDAO Grants Committee Members, Chair, and Foundation Operator)*

Learn more about these examples of grants programs here.

Organizations are using Hats Protocol to save time, automate onboarding, and manage permissions across the internet with programmable onchain roles. See all 12 use case examples and 6 organizational case studies on the Hats Protocol website here, and get in touch here to book a demo.

This is why we are incubating Hats protoDAO as part of our commitment to creating a truly decentralized organization that can govern the Hats Protocol commons for decades to come.

Now in its third season, Hats protoDAO includes 38 stewards from leading onchain organizations that are using Hats Protocol, building with it, and contributing to the Hats ecosystem, along with 60 contributors who have been recognized and rewarded for the value they’ve created.

Here are some of the highlights from the past two seasons of the protoDAO, a preview of what’s ahead, and how you can get involved.

The Hats ecosystem is divided into distinct contribution zones, each playing a vital role in the growth and sustainability of Hats protoDAO. 

Stewards: Hats Stewards collectively govern the shared resources of Hats protoDAO, support the progressive decentralization of the project, and advance the adoption and growth of the Hats Protocol ecosystem. 

We are honored to have an incredible set of Stewards, including from organizations like Charmverse, Coordinape, 0xFoster, Gnosis Guild, LexDAO, MakerDAO, Purple, Radworks, RaidGuild, RareDAO, ReHash, SafeDAO, Sobol, Tally, and more. 

Interested in becoming a Steward? Applications to become a Steward will open once again in late August before Season 4 starts in September.

Contributors: Anyone can make and submit contributions to the protoDAO and receive REP for the value they created. There are more opportunities to contribute to Hats protoDAO than ever before, whether it's creating new modules, integrating Hats with other protocols, or creating content. 

Notable contributions receiving protoREP in Season 2 include:

• Farcaster & Hats Protocol open-source integration in Herocast

• Case studies for RaidGuild, Hats protoDAO, and ATXDAO (coming soon)

• App to distribute tokens to hat wearers based on the hat ID using 0xsplits

• CharmVerse + Hats integration

• Extensions on Hats Signer Gate (Safe multisig signing authority via Hats) to enable vetoes and other functionality

• Forkable reputation & roles system built for ATX DAO with Hats

• Hats <> Gitcoin Passport eligibility module

Check out available contribution opportunities on our Charmverse page (but you’ll have to claim your community member hat first to access).

Community Members: Claim your Community Member hat to receive access to the Hats Community Charmverse, Wiki, and Telegram group where 200+ Hats Community Members are sharing updates and demos of their cutting-edge Hats trees.

Since we launched the protoDAO in September 2023 with 18 founding stewards (voting members of the protoDAO), we have been building the foundations of a strong network and effective mechanisms that will serve as the basis for what we believe will become a world-class DAO. 

It is a “protoDAO” because it is not yet a true DAO. The protoDAO is currently a branch within the Haberdasher Labs hats tree. Haberdasher Labs is a legal entity contributing to the development of Hats Protocol and its ecosystem, and currently retains control over the Hats protoDAO. Each season, the protoDAO proposes and gains new authorities (via its hat, of course) as the project progressively decentralizes. This will continue until there are no more authorities to grant, at which point protocol governance will be fully decentralized and the protoDAO will have become a true DAO.

Over the course of the first two seasons, authorities that have been granted to the protoDAO include: 

• Distribute Hats protoREP

• Maintain the Hats Modules Registry

• Endorse and publish Hats ecosystem data standards

• Endorse and publish official Hats events

• Create individual roles within the protoDAO to advance one of the strategic priorities of the current season

These specific authorities exist in addition to components that are already available for open-source contribution and permissionless usage across the Hats Protocol Stack, as seen in the graphic below.

Now entering Season 3, the protoDAO is actively engaged in several key initiatives:

• Dogfooding Hats: We use our own protocol to experiment with new structures and test new features and integrations.

• Permissionless Role Staking & Hat Creation Process: We’re experimenting with staking as a key accountability mechanism while leaning into permissionlessness and emergence, enabling Stewards to stake protoDAO voting shares to claim a hat that gives them special privileges, including the power to define their own hats and co-create the protoDAO structure

• Farcaster Channel Curation by Stewards: Using Hats FarcasterDelegator to collectively curate the /hatsprotocol Farcaster channel and share casting rights on a Hats protoDAO Farcaster account

• Decentralized Compensation Mechanism: Incorporating Farcaster tipping and codifying the mechanisms by which Hats builders and contributors are recognized and rewarded

• Deploying DAO Operations Tooling to increase steward accountability and more effectively measure contributor value creation

Join us as we strive to create and steward the best possible primitive for programmable organizations, and explore and curate the vast design space of how to use the protocol to solve real problems.

Join the Hats Community: Claim your Community Member hat here and contribute to the growing /hatsprotocol channel on Farcaster.

Make contributions, earn protoREP: Submit your Hats projects, integrations, or other contributions to the protoDAO to earn protoREP: onchain reputation points that convert to voting power when you become a Steward.

Attend monthly Hats town halls & deep dives. Subscribe to get all Hats events added to your calendar.

We believe in a future where organizations are permissionless, global, and censorship-resistant. And we believe that the next era of organizations is going to create the most effective organizations in history. 

Season 3 is now underway. Grab your hat and join in here.

FD is the Hats team’s open-source contribution to the incredible builder party that is unfolding on Farcaster. We are true believers in open-source and hope that you will use it, contribute to it, and fork it, and expand on it however you like.

FarcasterDelegator is a smart contract that holds a FID and enables delegation of casting authority and other FID permissions to individuals or groups.

The individuals and groups can be either a) ethereum addresses or b) onchain roles (represented as token IDs via Hats Protocol).

Our team has participated in and worked on dozens of DAOs and onchain organizations over the last four years. Time and time again we have seen the pain of securely sharing access to a twitter account to post and engage on behalf of a group.

The problem with twitter is that, like many offchain applications, the platform has a closed architecture as well as an expensive and revocable API.

Farcaster changes this. The protocol’s open and interoperable architecture uniquely unlocks the possibility of shared accounts. And it does so in a way that opens up an exciting design space for programmability, capture resistance, and financialization.

In the last cycle, many teams designed interesting curation and decentralization experiments around the idea of posting via a shared account (for example The DIA). We remain bullish on these concepts and new ideas that will emerge from these primitives.

Since the prioritization and initial spec of decentralized channels by the Merkle team, we believe that shared channel ownership and shared channel moderation are going to greatly expand the value of onchain shared account functionality.

The base functionality of FD enables onchain shared account ownership, including initial setup, adding signers, and updating the recovery address for the FID. The first version has been live since February.

There are two flavors of FD:

1. FarcasterDelegator.sol — a generic abstract contract with delegation logic that can be extended to be used with any identities and roles

2. HatsFarcasterDelegator.sol — a version of FD powered by Hats Protocol, that tokenizes the roles and includes robust admin functionality

Here's the repo:

https://github.com

GitHub - Hats-Protocol/farcaster-delegator: A contract that owns a Farcaster fid and delegates casting rights via Hats

A contract that owns a Farcaster fid and delegates casting rights via Hats - Hats-Protocol/farcaster-delegator

Check out the README for full developer documentation!

We open-sourced this because the delegation logic is non-trivial to build (managing onchain signing permissions with the Farcaster protocol is not easy), it can be built once and used by the whole Farcaster builder ecosystem.

With the Hats flavor of FD, you can provide your users with interoperable onchain roles that can be plugged into other tools. This goes both ways — creating an interface for tokenized roles makes it easy for people with existing roles to easily onboarding into your tool.

Much like Farcaster creates an interoperable social graph, Hats creates an interoperable organizational graph. In Hats, roles are represented as ERC1155 tokens — you can learn more about how the protocol works in our docs and our recent vision post.

It is easy to set up Hats for any narrow use case, and shared Farcaster account ownership is a great example of this. But when your users want to expand their channel’s operations, they could incrementally expand the roles into other tools that you use. This includes things like:

• budgets for operational teams or grant committees (Safe integration)

• shared workspaces (Charmverse and Fileverse integrations)

• voting on specific decisions (Snapshot and various DAO contract integrations)

Imagine it like progressive decentralization of an account or channel. We think this is where the next wave of DAOs is going to come from, and that it is going to be really big.

Hellno at Herocast was the first to implement the full flows for FD in a Farcaster client. Herocast is also open-source, and you can visit the repo with the FD implementation here. We are really impressed with and grateful for Hellno’s work on this.

Willy at Nounspace is already working with Herocast’s open-source repo and will support the Hats version of FD as well.

We are really impressed by what developers around the Farcaster are building. We are primarily working at the contract level and are excited to permissionlessly interoperate with all clients and bots. We believe that this is congruent with the approach the Farcaster Protocol is taking.

Next up, the Hats team is actively working on developer tooling that will make it easier for clients to integrate FD and the Hats flavor for management of channels with fully onchain roles.

If you’d like support with integrating FD into your client, or want a shared account and need help getting it set up, please let us know! You can DC @nintynick.eth or @spengrah.eth or reach out to us in the /hatsprotocol channel, we’d love to hear from you.

We know that it’s possible to create organizations that are internet-native, permissionless, global, and censorship-resistant. The fundamental vision that attracted many of us to this space is still alive.

But nobody knows what it’s going to look like.

At Hats, we love organizations. And we have an idea for what’s coming next.

We believe the future of organizations is code-based and onchain. We believe that it is possible for organizations with widely distributed ownership to coordinate shared resources and attention and actually get things done.

Actually, we’re more optimistic than ever. We believe that the next era of organizations is going to create the most effective organizations in history.

And it all starts with the organizational graph.

Every organization that uses the internet today faces a major problem: a tremendous amount of effort is required to maintain fragmented data about contributors, roles, and permissions across all of its tools and applications.

This problem scales with a) the number of software tools an organization wants to use, and b) the number of agents that are in the organization. Both of these numbers are rapidly increasing — especially as AI agents rapidly enter the workforce and begin to require nuanced permissions. This problem is only getting worse.

We propose a new solution: an interoperable organizational graph that holds all of this data and makes it available to every other tool an organization wants to use.

Change your roles and permissions once, and watch them automatically propagate to all of your connected tools. This saves your organization time and effort keeping everything in sync, and also opens up new capabilities that didn’t exist before.

This is not an entirely new idea. Role-based access control has existed within individual applications for decades, and single sign-on has extended that idea across platforms. 

What’s novel is actually substantiating your organization as a code-based graph of roles and using that as the basis for managing everything in your organization, across all your tools.

Taking this a step further, Hats turns the organization itself into a digital object, ready to be programmed. All of the properties of your organization and its individual roles can now be automated, just like any other software system.

As we set out to create a platform for organizational graphs, we have three key principles:

1. A role-based framework is the best way to encode organizations.

2. Interoperability is king.

3. We are standing up a future-proof public utility.

Let’s dive in and see how this works in practice.

A platform for building organizational graphs must have a good framework for expressing what an organization is. In Hats Protocol, graphs are made up of roles, which we see as the atomic unit of organizational structure.

Roles — which we call “hats” — are rich objects that bundle responsibilities, permissions, and incentives. These are the nodes in the graph. They are represented as tokens, which are held by agents (Ethereum accounts). Because of the flexibility of accounts in the EVM, they can easily be controlled by individuals, groups, DAOs, smart accounts, or AI agents, with any decision-making structure you can think of onchain.

The connections between the nodes of the organizational graph are the admin and accountability relationships between roles.

Admins get certain in-protocol permissions, like being able to create new roles, select which agents will get each role, and modify the permissions delegated to a role so the agent can accomplish its responsibilities.

Accountability relationships make it possible for any agent in the graph to hold the responsibility for evaluating and aligning another agent’s performance. They can revoke hats that are misused or no longer needed. 

In Hats Protocol, all of these interfaces are extensible by developers. Organizations can easily automate the granting and revoking of roles, admin relationships, and accountability using any criteria or logic. Hats ecosystem developers have already created over 15 automations that organizations can plug into their graphs without writing any code.

Of course, it is the permissions delegated to a hat that make it powerful. Specifically, we’ve seen that there are a few categories of permissions that are particularly important for organizational operations:

• Control of funds, operational budgets, and compensations streams

• Ownership or voting power in domain-specific decisions

• Identity that you can use to represent the organization in other contexts

• Access to data, communication channels, and workspaces

• Ability to modify, publish, and execute code

Ultimately, organizational efficiency is a function of pushing both decision-making and execution as close to the edges of the organization as possible. Hats enables this for onchain organizations, making it possible to get things done even with a widely distributed set of owners and stakeholders.

The best platform for creating organizational graphs will be a singular piece of public infrastructure that the whole world can permissionlessly use, contribute to, and integrate with. This is because both users and developers benefit from increased network effects. 

For users, the best graph platform is the one that connects with the highest number of technologies and applications your organization uses. The more parts of your organization that you can include in your organizational graph, the more powerful the graph becomes.

For developers, the widest distribution and revenue opportunity will be on the organizational graph platform that has the most users. Developers already love integrating with Hats because they can tap into the whole ecosystem of existing Hats Protocol graphs. 

And because every integration built by developers expands interoperability and makes Hats yet more valuable to organizations, there is a virtuous cycle benefiting developers and organizations. This is the fundamental flywheel of Hats.

Hats Protocol is intentionally architected in a way that amplifies these network effects. The protocol is open source, and leverages existing Ethereum standards to create elegant interfaces for composability. What this enables is permissionless innovation — anybody can build new tools, applications, and businesses that leverage Hats organizational graphs.

As an onchain protocol, Hats inherently integrates with tokenized assets and decentralized finance. This opens up an entire world of automations and permissions related to asset ownership, compensation, and operational budgets that are superior to what traditional solutions are able to achieve.

The final piece of the puzzle is incentives. At maturity, the protocol should draw on those financial primitives to facilitate interactions where participants receive value for what they create for the ecosystem. This would pour fuel on the fire of the existing network effects, significantly increasing the motivation of both organizations and developers to use and integrate with the platform.

Taking a unified approach to building an important piece of infrastructure requires assurances for the organizations and developers who choose to integrate with it. This brings us to our final principle.

Given its potential scale, network effects, and likelihood of accruing significant value as a key point of integration, it is important that Hats Protocol is built as credibly neutral infrastructure. 

The protocol is designed with web3-native constraints and assurances that support ecosystem-wide coordination, even at massive scale. The platform is as trustless as possible, and uses mechanisms to facilitate trust between participants when necessary.

Most importantly, with Hats Protocol, organizations retain sovereign control over their own graph. Users are not locked into any single application or user interface to access their graph, and aren’t reliant on a single platform provider to create the integrations they need.

Open source code and immutable contract deployments make permissionless integration easier, and ultimately reduce platform risk for developers. This enables developers to invest in more new innovations built on Hats Protocol than on closed alternatives.

Organizational graphs will be a key point of integration for an organization’s automations, agents, and operational capabilities. As such, the platform is likely to be very valuable, and it is critical that the value created goes back to the ecosystem itself.

In the long-term, we believe web3-native shared ownership models can facilitate alignment between users, developers, and owners. This will ensure the platform is self-sustaining, valuable, and able to solve this problem at massive scale, without a concern that costs to organizations will become highly extractive.

Another way to say this is that Hats Protocol is a hyperstructure for building organizational graphs. We see this as an essential part of the future of organizations, and are committed to stewarding it with the intention, responsibility, and clarity of vision to get this right.

Organizations today are already using organizational graphs powered by Hats to save time and operate more effectively, and these benefits will continue to strengthen as the ecosystem grows.

Hats Protocol starts by solving the acute problem of high administrative costs associated with keeping permissions and roles up to date. But powerful organizational graphs that are programmable, interoperable, and capture-resistant will unlock a much broader set of new capabilities.

Organizations that are substantiated as digital objects — that fundamentally live in code — are about to significantly evolve the way that we work together. 

New automations will dynamically and intelligently update the graph to respond to real-time needs, increasing operational speed. AI agents will join the graph as part of the organization's workforce, automating work and decreasing costs. Cycles of delegation and execution — the lifeblood of organizations — will get faster and more effective.

These trends will produce the most effective organizations that have ever existed. Over the next decade, we believe that organizations will get 100x faster, fairer, and less political. They will be more efficient at stewarding shared resources and achieving shared goals. And they will be more enjoyable and fulfilling to contribute to and be a part of.

This is a very exciting time to be on the cutting edge of building organizations. But there is something even bigger at stake. 

Exponential technologies are already stressing the governance capacity of traditional companies and governments. Giant internet platforms and AI projects have grown too big and powerful for any single company or even nation states to govern effectively.

To ensure these technologies remain aligned with humanity, we must create decentralized, capture-resistant governance structures. Whether that looks like DAOs, network states, or something else — these organizations require an organizational graph that works for them.

Our vision for Hats Protocol is to birth a new category of organizations capable of meeting the challenge of owning and governing exponential technologies at global scale. The full stack of features in the protocol is what makes this possible:

1. A role-based organizational graph that is fully programmable

2. Compatibility with agents of all kinds — people, AI agents, DAOs, and multisigs

3. Automatable admin delegation and accountability relationships

4. Integration with all the technologies, tools, and applications organizations need

5. Designed for growth via network effects and a composable architecture

6. A future-proof public utility that is open source and credibly neutral

7. Aligned incentives that support fair value distribution and reliably low costs for users

We are part of the only industry crazy enough to take on the world’s governments, banks, and big corporations. Nowhere else in the world of technology has there been so much coordinated effort to ship open-source software that is fundamentally composable. And there has never been such a potent way to program value flows such that they can be shared amongst everyone who creates value in that ecosystem, without that ecosystem having a single owner.

At Hats Protocol, we are building public infrastructure for the next era of humanity. Join us.

• Hats Modules are programmable extensions for roles

• Modules can be connected to hats to expand their functionality, such as automatic granting/revocation and activation/deactivation based on specific conditions

• Any builder can create their own module, plug it into their own hats tree permissionlessly, and even make it available in any app that supports the Hats Modules Registry

• Any app can also tap into the Hats Modules infrastructure to offer these same module options to their end-users

• The Hats Modules Stack provides a Schelling point for ecosystem-wide coordination around programmable organizations

Today we are launching Hats Modules and a major upgrade to the Hats Protocol Stack.

From day one of Hats, we have been working toward four success criteria:

1. Implement a roles primitive via a secure and unopinionated core protocol

2. Empower developers to build their own extensions and automations on top of the protocol

3. Make it easy for developers to distribute the modules they create to the users that find them valuable

4. And most importantly: deliver all of this via a world-class user experience at the application layer that is simple, straightforward, and scalable

With the new Hats Protocol Stack, we believe the foundations are in place for all four of these goals. Building on the efforts of our predecessors, we see this as a significant advancement in the state of the art in open-source composability.

We anticipate that this release will create a new Schelling point for the ecosystem to discover and share highly-performant, onchain organizational structures. And by doing so, that we will begin to create organizations that are capable of outperforming any government or company in history.

This article assumes baseline familiarity with Hats Protocol. If you’re new to Hats, please check out this article for an introduction.

Let’s dive in.

At its core, Hats Protocol is a way for onchain organizations to create and manage roles. Roles have always been an essential part of computers and the internet, and Hats brings this primitive into Ethereum.

One of the key design criteria of the protocol was to keep the core architecture as simple as possible, while allowing for extensibility and creative expression in key areas. We have a fundamental principle of modularity which makes it possible to maintain simplicity for users without sacrificing decentralization or being overly opinionated.

The first and foremost area of extensibility is hat granting and revocation. This is expressed via the eligibility and toggle properties of each hat.

Eligibility: A hat’s eligibility property is an address that determines which other addresses are eligible to wear that hat. It can also revoke the hat if the wearer is no longer eligible.

Toggle: A hat’s toggle property is an address that determines whether the hat is active or inactive for all wearers.

Eligibilities and Toggles can be set to any Ethereum (or L2) address, meaning that individuals, multisigs, DAOs, and even any arbitrary smart contract can be granted these permissions.

This gets especially interesting — and the main focus of this article — when you set a hat’s eligibility or toggle to a smart contract. This allows you to connect arbitrary logic about when the hat can be held by a given wearer, or when a hat is active or inactive. This is what we call a module.

You can think of Hats Modules as programmable extensions for roles. Modules can be connected to hats to expand their functionality, such as enabling automatic granting and revocation of hats (and their associated permissions) based on specific conditions.

With the modules coming out with this release, you can already automate the granting and revocation of roles and permissions based on:

• Tokens, NFTs, and attestations, including ERC20 token balance, ERC721 NFTs, ERC1155 NFT tokenIDs, and EAS attestations

• Elections and allowlists, including election results from JokeRace, Snapshot, or Tally, automatic term limits, and manually-created allowlists

• Achievements and reputation, like badges, onchain points, Colinks, or Gitcoin passport score

• Prerequisite actions, like staking, signing an agreement, holding other roles, or being a subscriber

• And more: combine multiple criteria with and/or logic, introduce AI agents, or create granular onchain or offchain triggers

The list of modules currently available in the Hats app (with step-by-step guides found in the docs) is a starting place based on commonly requested patterns. But this is just the beginning.

What is truly powerful about the Hats Protocol Stack is that any builder can create their own module, plug it into their own hats tree permissionlessly, and even make it available to the broader ecosystem via the Hats Modules Registry and SDK.

For the first time, an entire ecosystem of brilliant DAO nerds, governance designers, and smart contract developers now have a way of building and sharing their best approaches to creating an onchain organization.

If you’re a governance facilitator, network coordinator, community manager, or DAO operator, the implications are massive:

• Save time and money by automating time-consuming community management tasks

• Increase security through automatic granting and revocation of permissions based on your specified eligibility criteria

• Increase decentralization by minimizing trusted actions and disintermediating human managers

• Reduce headaches and wasted motion by simplifying member onboarding and offboarding

• Inspire contributors to deepen their engagement by unlocking new roles and permissions automatically based on their achievements

Dive into the world of modules and experience the magic of programmatic granting and revocation, or contact us for help getting started.

Ready to see how the magic happens?

To understand how this all works, let’s take a look at each level of the stack. Hats Modules have parallels at the four key layers of the Hats Protocol Stack:

• 0: Smart Contracts

• 1: Indexed Data

• 2: Middleware

• 3: Applications

The lowest layer is smart contracts. All Hats Modules are smart contracts. Anybody can develop and deploy a Hats Module permissionlessly. To help make this easier, we’ve built a factory contract that makes deploying new instances of a module quick and cheap.

To be deployable via Hats Module Factory, a module needs to support some basic functionality. We’ve created a suite of dev tools to make this easy for builders: the HatsModule base contract contains everything necessary to be compatible with the factory, and the hats-module-template repo is the fastest way to get started developing a new module.

Getting a module onchain is just the start. The next question is how to attach it to a hat so it can do its job.

We’ve created a Hats Modules Registry to keep track of all the safe, quality modules that can be deployed by the factory and made available in any app that supports the registry. In addition to basic information like the ABI and implementation deployment addresses, each item on the registry also has additional metadata that describes how applications should display configuration and deployment options.

Like the Hats Core SDK, the Hats Modules SDK gives app developers powerful tools to bring module functionality into their apps. The Modules SDK serves two main functions: it packages up the module data from the registry for easy consumption, and exposes useful functions for deploying and configuring instances of modules on the registry via the Hats Module Factory.

At the top of the stack, apps can use the Hats Modules SDK to enable users to discover available modules; configure, deploy, and attach them to hats; and view their parameters and criteria. All without having to write any code specific to a single module.

Think about what this means:

• Module developers can build a module and have it be usable with Hats across all apps with no additional steps other than submitting it to the registry

• App developers can support all current and future modules without writing any module-specific code

• Users can access the same current and future modules across all apps

The Hats App makes heavy use of the Modules SDK to power all the module-related functionality described in earlier sections. And Sobol is working with the SDK and Registry to bring module capabilities to their Hats Composer.

The Hats Modules Stack provides an open platform where anyone can build and share their modules with the broader ecosystem through the official Hats Modules Registry. Every layer, from smart contracts to applications, is designed in the spirit of modularity, fostering an environment that's both developer-friendly and user-centric, providing simple UX for wearers without sacrificing decentralization.

Hats modules for all. 🧢

Hats Modules give builders the power to create programmable roles that users can bring with them across the internet.

With the Hats Modules Stack, builders can:

• Create programmable extensions for roles and automate granting and revocation of permissions based on custom logic

• Get fast distribution to all Hats users by listing your module on the Hats Modules Registry and see it come to life in any app that supports the registry.

• Create adapters to other protocols that facilitate the connection between Hats and various protocols or apps.

• Focus on the functionality you’re building; the protocol handles the rest

• Get started quickly with the hats-modules-template repo

Some of the types of modules you can create include:

• Eligibility modules that determine which addresses are eligible to wear a hat, and that can automatically revoke the hat the instant the wearer becomes ineligible

• Toggle modules that determine whether a hat is active or inactive for all wearers

• Hatter contracts that serve as the admin or one or more hats to implement specific logic, rules, or changes to hats (such as changing hat details or minting hats to new addresses based on custom logic)

Builders of other applications can also tap into the Hats Modules infrastructure to offer these same module options to their end-users. We’ve built the Hats Modules SDK to make this easy.

The Hats Modules Registry is now open for submissions. You can now build Hats modules, add them to the registry, see them get used in any app that supports the registry, and join the protoDAO to get recognized for your contributions.

Today, the registry is a github repo that is curated by the Hats protoDAO. Submissions can be made by opening a pull request. In the future, we anticipate moving the registry onchain and progressively decentralizing the curation mechanism.

At the protocol level, Hats is a tool for structuring organizations and delegating authorities. With this release, you can now embed any logic, rules, and accountabilities into your hats – while still maintaining all the benefits of decentralization and capture-resistance that DAOs can offer.

Hats Modules pave the way for new automations that can drive higher levels of organizational performance. Whether you're a member of a community or an individual builder, it's time to grab a hat and dive into this new era of programmable organizations.

• Use Hats Modules

• Build Hats Modules

• Join Hats Community

Here’s how 👇

Hats protoDAO governance runs through DAOHaus and Moloch v3 contracts.

Hats Contributors earn protoRep based on their contributions. Once they put on a Steward hat, their protoRep converts into protoVotes to govern the protoDAO commons.

Hats protoDAO uses hat-gated Safe multisigs to collectively manage its resources.

Revocable signing authority is delegated to individuals & teams using Hats to ensure the multisigs are ultimately controlled by the protoDAO as a whole.

Meanwhile, Sobol's Hats Composer app makes it easy for protoDAO members to connect their Hats Protocol hats, Safe multisigs, and DAOhaus DAOs together into a unified onchain governance system.

Hats protoDAO uses Quests and Splits as the primary tools for tracking contributions.

Contributors use Quests to log their contributions, which are then linked to the Hats Protocol Quest and other relevant Quests to create a network graph of contributions.

Within each Quest, contributors add a Splits address to split up the protoRep awarded to the contribution among themselves.

Splits + Quests creates a hyperstructure of contributions and reputation that will span the life of the project (and beyond).

Hats protoDAO uses hat-gated Coordinape circles to intersubjectively allocate protoRep based on a contribution's impact, using GIVE as a voting mechanism.

Each node in a Coordinape circle is a contribution identified by Splits address, plus a link to its Quest for details.

DeForm handles all the protoDAO's information-gathering needs.

By hat-gating our DeForms using its web3 capabilities, we ensure only the right hat-wearers (e.g., Hats Community Members) can access and submit the forms meant for them.

CharmVerse is the go-to information repository and wiki for Hats protoDAO.

CharmVerse pages are hat-gated with nuanced read/write/admin permissions: Community Hat-wearers can read & comment, Contributors can add new pages, and only Stewards can delete pages.

Hats protoDAO uses Collab.Land to hat-gate access into the protoDAO's Telegram channels.

The moment someone loses their hat, they're automatically kicked from the appropriate TG group by the Collab.Land bot.

When we need to share a private Google doc, sheet, or slides only with Community members, we hat-gate it with Guild.

Guild makes it easy to set read/comment/write permissions for our docs so only the right hat-wearers have the right permissions at any time.

Hats protoDAO uses Hats (of course!) to:

• manage access to the tools above

• automate onboarding, promotion & offboarding

• give people an onchain embodiment of their roles

• save our protoDAO coordinator tons of pain & time

Hats is what ties it all together.

Hats is the connective tissue that ties all your other tools together, an organizational roles and permissions layer that composes with all your favorite tools and is fully controlled by the org itself, mitigating risk of internal or external capture.

See more about our commitment to composability and book a demo here.

This launch marks a major step in our commitment to decentralizing the governance & operations of Hats Protocol.

What's the purpose of Hats protoDAO? And how can you join the Hats Community and get involved?

Read on!

The Hats protoDAO exists to 1) create and steward the best possible organizational primitive for roles, and 2) explore and curate the vast design space of how to use the protocol to solve real problems. It does this by:

• establishing valuable connections between members of the ecosystem,

• developing net new functionality for the ecosystem around the protocol, and

• governing the commons.

As a precursor to a true DAO, Hats protoDAO will set the foundations of 1) a strong network and 2) effective mechanisms for governance & reputation.

These will serve as the catalysts & basis for a world-class DAO that can govern the Hats Protocol commons for decades to come.

To join the Hats Community and get involved, claim your Hats Community Member hat here.

There you'll discover ways to contribute and stay updated as the protoDAO continues to evolve.

Over time, some Community Members may deepen their engagement to become Active Contributors and eventually Stewards.

Hats Stewards are responsible for collectively governing the shared resources of the protoDAO and supporting the progressive decentralization of the project.

We're honored to have an incredible set of founding Stewards, including @0xd2_eth @0xKaty @0xNN2 @0xRetro @Bmulligan56 @BryanPetes @cryptohun3y @dan2hunt @davehrilchman @ddwchen @gershido @JonathanHillis @_juliettech @mybellalogica @ProseEleven @scottrepreneur_ @shelby_steidl and @spengrah.

We're also grateful to our Active Contributors for their awesome contributions in the early stages of the project, including @clinamenic @homanics @KyleSt4rgarden @more_reese @topocount and @zachobront.

And finally, to our incredible community of hat wearers, builders, and contributors -- thank you thank you! A sincere tip of the cap to you all.

Hats protoDAO Season 1 starts today. Grab a hat and join in here.

This unlocks a whole new design space...

Here are 4 Hats templates you can fork today from groups like Cabin and ATX DAO:

Cabin uses a guild structure to organize contributors into one of five guilds. Each guild has a custodian hat worn by the guild leader(s) and an artisan hat worn by guild members, powering identity & reputation across the Cabin network.

With Hats, guild members are given the right authorities at the right time, including access to the guild’s communication channels, workspaces, and voting rights, drastically simplifying member onboarding and offboarding.

Inspired by ATX DAO, the Contribution Levels template gives organizations the ability to enable contributors to permissionlessly level up and claim new authorities as they increase their engagement based on whatever custom criteria the organization sets.

Allocate resources to workstreams & enable them to govern themselves, while ensuring that the DAO retains ultimate authority over signing permissions in those Safe multisigs, for strong capture-resistance.

Delegate roles and authorities automatically based on election results, such as the winners of a JokeRace. Once the election term ends, or if the winners become losers, the hat & its authorities are automatically revoked.

Want to fork one of these Hats templates and try it yourself? Get in touch and we'll make it happen!

Or, dream up your own structure in the Hats app. We can’t wait to see what new templates you create.

Go from idea to deployed Hats in minutes.

Here's how:

Visit the Hats App at app.hatsprotocol.xyz.

Once you’re there:

• Connect your wallet

• Click "Create a new tree" (hats are organized in trees)

• Add an image, name, and description for your new tree as seen in the image below

• Click "Create"

You're now the proud wearer of your very own top hat! This top hat is the first hat you will create; you can think of it as the superadmin of the entire hats tree.

You can now build out the rest of your tree with Edit Mode...

Edit mode lets you create whatever role structure you can dream up. To use edit mode:

• Select "Edit Tree"

• Create new hats

• Add images and details to those hats, as seen in the image below (don't forget to click "Save" after you’re done editing each hat)

Once you're done building out your tree, click "Deploy". Your hats tree is now onchain!

You can also export a .json of the tree changes or copy an executable hex code to execute the changes via a multisig or share your proposed changes with others.

You can now connect your hats with authorities by plugging them into token-gates.

Hat (1155 token) + gate = token-gated authority.

1. Safe multisig signing authority

2. Snapshot proposal creation & voting

3. DELV council voting authority

4. Coordinape circle access

5. Discord roles & channels via Collab.Land and Guild

6. Telegram groups via Collab.Land and Guild

7. Charmverse read/comment/write permissions

8. Wonderverse read/comment/write permissions

9. Google docs, sheets, and slides read/comment/write permissions via Guild

10. EOA wallet ownership (yes, hat-controlled wallets)

11. Many more web2 permissions via Lit Protocol

12. Literally anything that's token-gateable!

See the docs for a full list of hat-gateable authorities and setup guides.

Lastly, you can mint your hats to wearers!

Add addresses individually or via a CSV, and select "Mint Hats", as seen in the image below. Hats tokens can be held (or “worn”, as we say) by any address including an EOA, multisig, or contract.

That's it, you've now created your very first Hats tree and brought your roles onchain! 🥳

You can always continue to add to your tree or invite others to build out the tree with you, as wearers can create additional child hats to delegate responsibility further.

You can now add eligibility criteria (e.g., wallet holdings, staking, or election results) to dynamically determine which addresses are eligible to wear a hat & to revoke the hat if the wearer is no longer eligible.

Eligibility criteria you may use to determine which addresses are and are not eligible to wear a given hat include:

• Assets such as tokens, badges, and/or POAPs held by a given wallet address

• Staking requirements that specify an address must stake a minimum amount of a given token

• Active subscription, verifying whether or not an address is paying an ongoing fee (e.g., using Unlock Protocol)

• Election results specifying only the top N vote-getters of an election are eligible to wear a designated Hat

• Delegated tokens or votes that reach and/or stay above a given threshold

• Contributions and attestations such as those represented by Govrn contributions, Quests NFTs, or EAS attestations

• Humanistic eligibility based on specified criteria (e.g., an arbitration council or stewardship council rules on Hat eligibility according to predetermined rules)

• Any custom logic you can imagine that can be represented onchain

See the docs for a full list of eligibility criteria you can add to your hats.

Create your hats tree for free at app.hatsprotocol.xyz

For guides on all the above and more see the docs at docs.hatsprotocol.xyz

And if you need help getting started, book a demo call here

Happy hatting! 🧢

What makes Hats the ultimate coordination tool? Ohhh baby, here we go...

Hats are roles, and roles are how people coordinate to get things done.

Why are so many DAOs, networks, and decentralized organizations so chaotic? There are no roles! No roles = no structure = no accountability. The tyranny of structurelessness wins again...

But it doesn't have to be like that!

When roles are clear:

• work is no longer chaotic

• people know who to turn to for critical info

• people are empowered to make decisions and take action

• people can be held accountable!

Here’s the good news: Hats is easy to use and it composes with all the DAO tools you already know and love.

With Hats you can give contributors all kinds of different revocable (!) onchain & offchain permissions, including:

1. Safe multisig signing authority

Delegate & revoke multisig signing authority based on specific eligibility criteria (such as election winners, wallet holdings, allow-lists, staking requirements, and almost any other logic you can dream up).

2. Snapshot proposal creation & voting

3. DELV council voting authority

4. Coordinape circle access

Ensure only the right people can vote and dynamically tie voting eligibility to other conditions.

5. Discord roles & channels via Collab.Land and Guild

6. Telegram groups via Collab.Land and Guild

7. Charmverse read/comment/write permissions

8. Wonderverse read/comment/write permissions

9. Google docs, sheets, and slides read/comment/write permissions via Guild

Give people all the right permissions without any manual onboarding or offboarding — just mint them a hat!

10. EOA wallet ownership (yes, hat-controlled wallets)

11. Many more web2 permissions via Lit Protocol

11-100. Literally anything that's token-gateable

Imagine... you can even hold a JokeRace election that automatically gives the winners special authorities like multisig signing, voting rights & more. Once the election term ends, or if the winners become losers, the hat & its associated authorities are *automatically* revoked.

Role-based governance is the future, and Hats bundles all the things roles need: responsibility, authority, and accountability.

How does Hats empower orgs to ensure the right ppl & addresses always have the right permissions?

Step 1. Create roles. 🧢 Name your hat, add a description and an image, and determine admin authority over this role.

Step 2. Connect power to roles. ⚡️ Using composable primitives and easy-to-understand token IDs, connect a hat to onchain permissions and offchain authorities via token gates.

Step 3. Customize logic for how the role will be issued, revoked & deactivated. 🤝 Determine how the role will be distributed, revoked, and deactivated.

Step 4. Mint hat tokens to any Ethereum or L2 addresses: EOAs, Safes, DAOs & smart contracts. 🤠 Distribute hat tokens to Ethereum or L2 addresses — including EOAs, Safes, DAOs, and smart contracts — and make sure the right people and code have the right permissions at the right time.

Orgs can be decentralized AND have the structures and accountabilities they need to get things done. Hats enables orgs to create CAPTURE-RESISTANT structures to get shit done (safely).

This is why Hats composes with Tally Governor contracts, DAOhaus Moloch v3 and Aragon DAOs to enable decentralized organizations to delegate revocable roles to specific people & groups.

Hierarchy is no longer the enemy when the top of the hierarchy is the DAO itself.

Hats is permissionless and open-source!

• Use Hats at app.hatsprotocol.xyz

• See the website at www.hatsprotocol.xyz

• Visit our docs and guides at docs.hatsprotocol.xyz

• And get in touch if you need help getting started.

If you're inspired by Hats, please like & retweet this thread to help us get the word out. We love our hatvocates!

And give us a follow @hatsprotocol.xyz (X, Farcaster) to stay tuned for the launch of the Hats protoDAO in t-minus 1 month... 👀

Hold on to your hats, lots more to come!

Major hat tip to all those who have helped Hats get where it is today, including @AaronSoskin @antavedissian @BryanPetes @Bmulligan56 @BlockChainJames @Clinamenic @Converge4Impact @DAOhaus @Dan2Hunt @davehrlichman @Eric_rsno @Fifthworldzach @Gershido @hey_zayi @IDEOVC @JacobHomanics @Jafetsc @JamesTamplin @JonathanHillis @Lrettig @Meta_Cartel @More_reese @Mybellalogica @Niran @Notscottmoore @Opolis @Parkerjayp @ProseEleven @RaidGuild @Rathermercurial @Richiebonilla @Scotrepreneur_ @Seedclubvc @Sinahab @spengrah @TeamSobol @Topocount @tysullberg @Viiiiiiiiiiiid @Web3brett @WE3co @Willpapper @Zeitgeist_xyz @0xBillW @0xD2_eth @0x7u4n @0xJoshuaSL @0xNN2 @0xRetro @0xSkyMine and… you?? get involved here

Onboarding processes are poorly structured, often making it unclear who is responsible for what. Even in the rare cases where roles are clear, there are insufficient mechanisms to provide contributors with the essential information and permissions they need to take action on behalf of the collective.

This is a huge missed opportunity. If we are to truly realize the potential of DAOs, we need to empower the people who make them go.

Working with dozens of DAOs has revealed there are three things your contributors absolutely need in order to do great work: context, authority, and accountability.

Context: Contributors need the right information to get their work done, including what work streams and roles presently exist, who is responsible for what, and what tasks they are personally responsible for.

Authority: Contributors need to be delegated authority to make decisions and take actions on behalf of the collective within a specific domain of work, and provided with access to the workspaces and tools most relevant to that work.

Accountability: Contributors need to know that the other contributors they are relying on are going to show up, stick around, and follow through on their commitments.

With the right context, the necessary authorities, and clear accountabilities, contributors are catalyzed to do their best work.

This is why we’re building Hats, a protocol for roles and authorities in DAOs.

Out of the sea of information that flows through the DAO on any given day (felt most viscerally in the form of endless Discord notifications), contributors need to be able to cut through the noise and get the most important information that’s relevant to their work.

Hats are designed to shape a DAO’s organizational structure in a way that coordinates the information sharing in the DAO to get the right information to the right people based on their specific role. Sense-making tools like Sobol and Nestr are integrating with Hats to help both contributors and DAO operators visualize and better understand the current work structure of a DAO, including both ongoing roles and one-off projects.

Once empowered to advance a scope of work, contributors need the admin rights, read/write permissions, and resources necessary to get things done.

Token-gated apps like Charmverse, Snapshot, and Coordinape as well as token-gating platforms like Guild, Collab.Land, and Lit Protocol work with Hats out-of-the-box (as Hats themselves are ERC-1155-compatible tokens) to give DAOs management of access control for their contributors. Once authorities are associated with a Hat by the DAO, wearing a Hat automatically unlocks the associated resources, authorities, and permissions the individual, team, or guild needs to do the work they take responsibility for.

Nobody needs passwords, and transferring both on-chain and off-chain permissions is a breeze anytime people change roles or new contributors are added. Hats introduce an enabling infrastructure for DAOs, empowering contributors with the authorities they need to get work done.

To incentivize people to follow through and provide checks on power, contributors need to be held accountable to their peers and the agreements they have made. Crucially, this is how DAOs can remain resistant to capture.

Composable data legos like Govrn contributions, Quests NFTs, JokeDAO results, Otterspace badges, and EAS attestations feed into Hats to determine whether someone is eligible for a given role or authority and automate the granting and revoking of Hats accordingly.

If the Hat wearer is not following through on their commitments, accountability mechanisms the DAO has embedded can be manually or automatically triggered. This might include full revocation of the hat, as well as less severe penalties such as slashing DAO shares or tokens, or generating new reputation data.

DAOs don’t have to be messy and chaotic. We believe in a future where DAOs are able to catalyze people from around the world to make their greatest contributions, on behalf of the things they care about.

This is the future we’re excited to build with you. Join us!

To learn more about Hats Protocol, visit hatsprotocol.xyz

In the search for more fair and fluid forms of coordination, DAOs have rejected the centralized power structures of traditional organizations in favor of flatter, more distributed means of organizing. This shift away from hierarchy toward greater decentralization has ushered in novel models for more democratic and inclusive decision-making. 

At the same time, however, this shift has also led to a general lack of role clarity, insufficient accountability mechanisms, and an over-reliance on full-consensus decision making. DAO governance is getting in the way of DAO effectiveness.

How can DAOs get things done with the same (or better) level of effectiveness as traditional organizations, while maintaining their core values of decentralization and individual autonomy? 

By incorporating a key building block of human organization that is consistently overlooked in DAOs: roles.

When roles are clear, work is no longer chaotic; people know who to turn to for critical information; individuals are empowered to make decisions within a specific domain of work; and the whole system has clarity over individual responsibilities and commitments. 

Roles are the fundamental unit of structure in any organization.

Roles for DAOs: Three Key Properties

Currently, non-hierarchical organizations do not have a good way to explicitly delegate or revoke roles, responsibilities, and authorities.

This insight led us to a key question: what should roles for DAOs look like?

We see three primary design goals for DAO-native roles:

1. The ultimate authority needs to be held by the DAO to maintain decentralization and gain the benefits of capture resistance. Roles must be able to be grantable and revocable by the DAO as a whole, and the DAO must be able to determine its own custom logic for role eligibility and maintenance.

2. Roles need to empower individuals to make decisions and take actions. This means the role needs to bring with it the necessary context, permissions, and accountabilities that people need to do their work.

3. DAO roles needs to be fundamentally composable within the web3 ecosystem, including but not limited to:

   1. plugging directly into token gates to enable on-chain powers as well as off-chain access rights, 

   2. Reading credentials, badges, and/or contribution and reputation data to automatically grant and revoke roles based on whatever custom logic the DAO creates,

   3. Working with existing governance structures, including DAO contracts, multisigs, pods, and more.

Hats Protocol is designed around these three properties. Hats are tokenized roles for DAOs, giving contributors the context, permissions, and accountabilities they need to do great work.

How Hats Works

Hats empowers DAOs to explicitly delegate specific roles and responsibilities, along with their associated authorities, to individuals or groups (or any smart contract). Authorities may include hard or soft powers such as accessing certain documents or communication channels, multisig signing authority, github admin rights, voting powers, and much more. 

Hats themselves are ERC-1155-compatible tokens that are transferable by the DAO but not the “wearer.” DAOs can create as many new hats as they want, and then plug the hat token IDs into token gates to give the wearers of each respective hat the necessary authorities and access to fulfill their responsibilities. 

DAOs can then take a number of actions regarding the hat, including:

• Deciding who “wears” each hat they create

• Deactivating hats

• Revoking hats from wearers, and

• Holding wearers accountable to their commitments. 

Each hat can also create and grant additional sub-hats, resulting in hats-trees that break down large scopes of work into more manageable pieces that can be delegated appropriately. 

DAOs can manually grant and revoke Hats to EOAs and multisigs (and even other contracts), but they can also extend Hats Protocol to implement their own logic for programmatic Hat granting and revocation.

What Hats Enables

Using Hats, DAOs can more effectively organize contributors and execute on important projects. Rather than a single power hierarchy, Hats allows organizations to create finite hierarchies within a collectively-governed whole. This allows fit-for-purpose structures to arise as needed to carry out specific functions, such as a bounty or grants program, dispute resolution process, client project team, or elected stewardship council. 

The organizing structure of the DAO is co-created rather than imposed, and power is delegated but can always be revoked. As a result, Hats Protocol provides a DAO-native way of structuring your organization to get things done.

We can get things done at scale without resorting to traditional power structures. We can empower individuals without giving up collective sovereignty. 

We can’t wait to see what you'll build with Hats!

To learn more about Hats Protocol, visit hatsprotocol.xyz

DAOs (decentralized autonomous organizations) could be amazing.

But they’re falling short of their potential.

Why? One of the biggest issues I see is that DAOs, like all non-hierarchical organizations, don’t have a good way to delegate roles, responsibilities and authorities to get things done.

There’s been a lot of talk in this space about voting delegation and its importance in DAO governance -- giving your voting power to a delegate who will vote in DAO governance on your behalf. I’m talking here about operational delegation -- giving people and small groups revocable authority so they can act on behalf of the organization and get things done efficiently.

Currently only hierarchies are good at this. And so many DAOs either end up larping as a decentralized network but really are controlled by a small group, or they wallow in the tyranny of structurelessness, unable to get things done with any level of coherence and consistency.

I believe this is one of the most important problems in the space that we need to address. This post presents a framework for how we can think about and solve this issue.

The good and bad news is this problem is not unique to DAOs. It’s following the same pattern seen in decentralized organizations, cooperatives, and networks of all kinds, which I wrote about in the book Impact Networks. Over and over again I’ve seen collaborative efforts that have so much promise, but something is getting in the way of them really fulfilling their potential: the tragedy of the responsibility commons.

What is a responsibility commons? Whenever groups of people coordinate to do something together, things will come up that need to get done. Often, as things come up, it’s unclear who is responsible to take specific things on, and those things then fall into a responsibility commons.

In hierarchies, people have very clear roles and are delegated authority to cover the necessary responsibilities, so the responsibility commons stays small and manageable. But in networks of agents (like DAOs), where nobody has explicit power over anybody else, there is no mechanism to assign – or ensure that the right individuals are claiming – responsibility.

As a result, many of the things that need to get done either go unclaimed or undelegated, or they are claimed by the wrong person, or they are claimed by someone who doesn’t actually follow through. This is the tragedy of the responsibility commons, and it's a huge reason why DAOs today are largely unable to get things done at the same level of efficiency as traditional organizations.

To understand how we can overcome the tragedy of the responsibility commons, we have to look closely at how we’re organizing, and what’s getting in the way.

Hierarchies have been a dominant organizing structure for thousands of years. They are great at getting things done efficiently in complicated domains where we know what needs to be done and we can plan things out in advance. People in hierarchical organizations are generally pretty clear on their responsibilities, or they can be delegated responsibility by someone higher in the hierarchy. Hierarchical structures are also predictable and stable, so they can scale effectively.

However, hierarchical structures are often limited in their ability to address complex and multifaceted issues that don’t have a clear solution. In the face of complexity, the rigid structure creates bottlenecks. And while the structure may be reliable, its inflexibility also means it is slow to adapt.

Meanwhile, the high concentration of power within hierarchies means that certain groups at the top have enduring structural advantages and are rewarded far more compared to those lower in the organization, perpetuating inequities and discouraging those at the bottom from fully engaging. In other words, they are “captured”. The system’s distribution of power is out of balance. Certain groups and individuals resemble a black hole, capturing a disproportionate amount of resources from the system compared to the value they are providing.

For these reasons, we are now seeing a widespread shift away from entrenched power hierarchies, and a rise of cooperatives, purpose trusts, and DAOs around the world, each of which are taking a network approach to coordination.

Networks are actually quite good at engaging complex issues, because they are able to combine diverse perspectives to discover new possibilities, they are resilient and adaptive, and they’re much more capture resistant than hierarchies. Overall, networks are far better suited than hierarchies at governing and stewarding shared resources and public goods, which is why DAOs have evolved to take a network approach to coordination and favor collective decision-making over unilateral control.

But as they grow larger and more diffuse, DAOs, like all networks, struggle to achieve clarity on roles and responsibilities, hold people accountable to their commitments, and explicitly delegate and revoke authorities.

All this leads to… the tragedy of the responsibility commons

The solution to this tragedy is the ability to explicitly delegate roles and responsibilities in a nuanced way down to the level of the individual, provide (and revoke if needed) the necessary authorities and permissions to fulfill those roles and responsibilities, and create accountability mechanisms so people follow through on their commitments.

As stated above, currently only hierarchical organizations are good at this. Therefore, to solve the tragedy of the responsibility commons in non-hierarchical organizations, we need a means of delegating or revoking roles and authorities in a way that still reinforces decentralization of power.

We need structure that doesn’t result in capture. Structure where the ultimate authority is held not by an individual, but by the collective as a whole. Structure that gives people power-to without creating entrenched power-over structures across the whole organization.

What’s missing from DAOs is the ability to create finite hierarchical structures within a collectively-governed whole.

We can blend the best of hierarchies and networks so that we get the resilience and capture resistance of networks with the implementation chops of hierarchies.

What could it look like to create fit-for purpose hierarchical structures within a collectively governed whole? Let’s take at two examples.

Let’s say a DAO wanted to add the capability to run a grants program, which will require some structure. The DAO could give the authority to a grants committee to make decisions about how grants are selected.

The grants committee then determines that it needs specific individuals, who they call grants champions, to be accountable for following the progress of each grant, and supporting the grantee along the way. So the committee delegates authority to the champion, who oversees the work of the grantee and makes sure the grantee has access to the relevant documents and resources they need to do their best work.

As you can see here, there is structure, but it is fit for purpose: it arises when needed, and will dissipate when it is no longer needed. You can also see here the conditions for solving the tragedy of the responsibility commons: there is a clear delegation of responsibility and authority, but that authority is revocable and could even be connected to specific eligibility criteria or accountabilities, and ultimately it is the collective who holds the ultimate power — the DAO is at the root of the authority tree, not an entrenched individual.

The structure is built to get things done, while remaining entirely capture resistant.

Let’s take a second example, the case where a DAO recognizes the need to create a specific project team or working group to organize an event at EthDenver. By authority of the whole, it could spin up a project team to get that done, and give the team signing authority on a multisig to organize the event.

That’s a good start, but it’s not enough. We need to be able to delegate responsibility further, down to the level of the individual, because even teams need clear roles and accountabilities. One of the roles the team identifies is a facilitator.

So the project team elects a facilitator, to give them certain powers like authority over a discretionary budget, and the ability to cast to warpcaster on behalf of the team. The facilitator is also responsible for overseeing the work of some external contractors responsible for catering and logistics, as well as giving those contractors the permissions they need to get access to the group’s communication channel and relevant documents.

With this structure, you can see that the facilitator has certain powers to get things done, but this is not power over the members of the project team. Quite the opposite — the team members actually have the authority to revoke the powers of the facilitator, and to elect a new facilitator if they’d like. And meanwhile the DAO has the authority over the team as a whole.

So while there is a structure, created to fulfill a specific purpose, it is resistant to capture, and the structure is collectively governed by the group. Once the event is finished, the team’s authorities could be revoked by the DAO, and the structure dissolves as it’s no longer needed.

These are just two of many possible capture-resistant “structure legos” that DAOs could adopt. You can think of these structure legos as fit-for-purpose structures to unlock new capabilities for your DAO… a way to give structure its place within the self-organizing organism of a DAO.

This is what is meant by structure without capture, and this is what I believe will solve the tragedy of the responsibility commons, enabling DAOs and other networked organizations to create capture-resistant structures to get things done.

This is also precisely what we’re working on at Hats Protocol, a protocol for role and authority delegation. A protocol for structure without capture.

Learn more and get involved at hatsprotocol.xyz. We’re excited to see what structure legos you create with it!

We think this is a missing piece of DAOs. Join us in stewarding its evolution.

How to Get Involved

Hats is just getting started, so our needs are broad and varied. Specifically, we're seeking contributors to advance:

• UI/UX design,

• front-end development,

• protocol engineering,

• subgraph development,

• branding & marketing (memelording),

• something else in your zone of genius.

If you resonate with what we’re working on, we'd love to hear your ideas and accentuate your unique gifts in service of this mission.

The Evolution of Hats

We believe that for Hats Protocol to thrive as foundational infrastructure for DAOs, it must ultimately be owned and governed by its community. While we build the protocol itself, we also aspire to build a DAO that sets a new standard for protocol DAOs.

This will require intentionally building the structures, practices, and culture to facilitate fully permissionless and decentralized governance. From day one, we commit to living into the ethos of the DAO movement, and transparently tracking the contributions that people make to the protocol.

As we track contributions to the protocol, we anticipate that the DAO will develop a simple reputation system that grants committed contributors greater responsibility, autonomy, and authority.

DAOs could be amazing. But governance is hard. Today, DAOs are making tradeoffs between decentralization and effectiveness. What they’re missing is a familiar piece of organizational infrastructure: roles. 

We believe that a DAO-native way of delegating and revoking roles, responsibilities, and authorities is the next upgrade for DAOs that will solve this dilemma. DAOs no longer have to choose: we can get things done at scale while embodying the values of decentralization and autonomy. 

DAOs who use Hats will:

• Delegate authorities to individuals while retaining ultimate control by the collective,

• Experience less pain and administrative costs associated with managing contributors and transferring authorities from one person or team to another,

• Effectively hold contributors accountable to their commitments,

• Clearly understand what’s actually happening across the DAO at any point in time, including where any gaps exist.

Contributors who wear Hats will:

• Feel clear and confident in executing their roles,

• Instantly have all the authorities they need to do their work (e.g., discord role, wiki admin rights, multisig signer, twitter access, etc.),

• Know who to go to for important information or decisions,

• Understand which roles are not yet fulfilled that they could be eligible for.

To use Hats and learn more about how it works, check out the open-source repo on Github or connect with us here.

Why We Exist

At Hats, we see that DAOs are changing the world.

We are impassioned by the possibility of a vibrant future, one that is fairer for everyone and resistant to capture by bad actors. One where our shared technological infrastructure lifts us up instead of extracting our data, money, and attention. 

We envision a future where coordinating is less costly than competing; where we are able to work together effectively to address the complex issues of our time; and where everyone is able to contribute to their fullest ability while sharing in the governance over and upside of collective endeavors.

We believe that DAOs can get things done at scale without resorting to the hierarchical power structures of traditional organizations. 

We know we can work together to usher in a new paradigm of human coordination. 

We are DAO operators and builders. We participate in DAOs, design mechanisms, write code, and communicate in a DAO-native way. Hats was born out of and continues to be informed by our own experiences in DAOs.

We are dreamers. We seek to help humanity transition to the post-scarcity economy that facilitates a safe, fair, and healthy world for all. 

We know the power of collective action and collective intelligence. Coordination is integral to who we are as humans, and advancing coordination is imperative to our progress as a species.

We uphold that DAOs are the most capture-resistant form of governance to-date, and we are inspired to build new tools and mechanisms that advance this form of sovereignty. 

We believe that sovereignty and autonomy are foundational to the future we want to live in. We see this as a precondition to self-actualization, fulfillment, and thriving for individuals, and also as a prerequisite for a sustainable collective.

We believe in a future that is fun. We live into joy and play in all aspects of our life, including our work. This informs how we relate, how we design, and how we show up.

We uphold the following values and principles in our work:

• Positive-Sum Coordination — Hats will thrive if the DAO ecosystem thrives, and we commit to an ethos of coordination in all that we do. We believe in the power of composability, in building on one another’s gifts and accentuating collaboration over competition. We make tradeoffs in favor of openness because we see that the sum is greater than the parts.

• Attribution — We commit to transparently tracking the contributions that people make to the protocol, and recognizing the value of those contributions.

• Inclusion — We recognize the potential of every person to contribute, and seek to advance a paradigm where individual capabilities can be expressed fully in service of collective goals. We see web3 and the DAO movement as an opportunity to reorganize the economy so that everyone is included. In our own nascent organization, we are committed as a first step to actively recruiting non-male contributors, and ensure that all contributors are respected and heard. 

• Practicing What We Preach — We will be dogfooding Hats Protocol to catalyze our ability to operate as a DAO as early as possible. Our intention is to progressively distribute power as quickly as it is safe to do so.

• Living into First Principles — We acknowledge that we’re on the frontier, that there won’t always be examples, and we’re not afraid to come to our own conclusions.