DAOs are a framework for coordination, rather than the product itself. As a result, there is no single solution to governance. Across use cases, DAO governance should be tailored to the utility of its members. For example, collector DAOs such as PleasrDAO benefit from a closed network of curators, while treasury management DAOs like Juicebox benefit from an open network of builders. The most exciting DAOs are at the edge of social, curation, and new modes of work. Interestingly enough, these three instances meet at one focal point: NFTs.

There are two modes to approaching group purchasing of NFTs: item-first and people-first. To purchase an item, a group pools in funds, usually as a collective of strangers — all driven by the promise of the artist’s mission, returns, or the pudgy penguin’s face. We believe that the people-first model enables a better approach investing.

Wealth is more meaningful when shared with others.

Small collectives are the future of Web3 social. Each small group distributes risk and capital, while also coordinating alongside wider goals. A koop can become a a group chat that apes into projects or a large fund. The differentiation between the two become increasingly blurred in Web3.

Koops are borderless and permissionless.

Even more exciting, the opportunity to play and build is open to anyone. No previous history or significant capital required. Rather than token gating, Koop encourages social signaling and skill-based bridges. You can become a leader in a Koop as voting becomes more fluid. Social rewards drive good behavior and group consensus. Why is this powerful? Small holder does not mean small contributor. The two are typically inversely related as it takes more effort to involve yourself or be heard in a DAO without the wallet movement to back up your legitimacy.

Moving away from token voting

Token voting is skewed towards a few key influencers. Large players can largely sway voting, without having to prove their loyalty and staked interests in the long term viability of a group. While coin voting makes the Koop collectively accountable, each voter is also held individually accountable through a networked reputation.

The distinction between financial and social platforms are fading, but this does not mean we should settle for bundled economic and social components in governance. Points in a Koop are built to be non-transferable and non-marketable, thus ensuring that work decisions are made by those with functional role expertise. Inside of a Koop, you begin building your on chain reputation.

Being a collector and curator is a job, as well as a way to join a community. Our social experiences provide more utility and value than previously imagined, and we should be rewarded for doing so. Few products have been built with the intention of enabling friends to produce collectively and generate wealth fluidly. Koop changes this. Trust is reinforced through repeated socialization and coordination.

How governance works on Koop

What is Dunbar’s number for the amount of mindshare that should be allocated to a decision? Very few when there are experts in the room. Everyone should have a stake in governance, but there should also be mechanisms to encourage sending voting power to other individuals. Many times, a highly trusted, knowledgeable group of 2–3 individuals is capable of making better decisions than the whole.

Delegated democracy allows for specialized knowledge to be utilized. This frees up time within each collective, while also enabling passive income within koops.

Submit a proposal

A proposal is instantiated. Users can upvote or downvote the proposal. Voting alongside the consensus is rewarded. Your voting weight is based on your ETH contributed and your reputation as an NFT investor. Reputation is determined by the number of proposals you’ve submitted that have passed and that also returned a net positive return to the Koop.

Tiered contributors

Points act as a signal on which koops to join and which users to trust. There are three tiers:

Gold 🥇 — 30 proposals

Silver 🥈 — 20 proposals

Bronze 🥉 — 10 proposals

Points are set on a concave dividend rate, in which going from 0 points to 5 is worth more than going from 10 to 20.

Voting

There is a one week countdown on each proposal. If the majority of voting power says Yes (51%), the proposal is executed immediately. If 50% of the voting power votes no, it is immediately closed. 60% of voting points need to be present for a proposal to pass. We currently support immediate resale proposals on OpenSea. After an asset is resold, the koop closes. Users can then start a new koop, or join an existing koop.

El Fin

Individuals are enabled like never before. No lengthy paperwork, no joint bank account, and no maintenance fees. Shared wallets and NFTs are tools enabling easy decision making and skills-based working models.

Crypto is about communities, while fractionalization is driven by exit liquidity for large holders. An even more powerful primitive for group purchasing is a no code solution for spinning up a lightweight DAO, syndicate, or treasury-backed group-chat. This is what the future of work looks like — holding a balance sheet with friends, transacting across ecosystems, all while creating on -chain reputation as holders and contributors. Joining a mission as a group drives individuals to accomplish what would have been previously impossible along.

Friends bring friends into crypto. All you need is one degen to lead the way. The Internet is fun again. We need a mechanism to bring everyone into the new world of social, investing and collaboration. This is a call to action. Start a koop.

Get involved

We are incredibly excited to continue along this journey, and we are actively looking for members to help create the Koop community. There is so much to build.

Join us on:

Discord: https://discord.gg/Rfq9uJsp9Z

The theory of the firm seeks to explain why companies and organizations arose, when individuals could, in theory, engage in pairwise transactions. The explanation is that firms exist to reduce coordination and transaction costs: all the things that make it hard for people to work together, solve problems, and deliver value effectively and efficiently. But what happens when tools for coordination are more widespread, and a whole range of innovations -- from Zoom to Discord to DAOs -- makes it easier to work together outside of formalized organizations?

It’s increasingly difficult to draw hard boundaries between the inside and the outside of an organization. And, for businesses that need to adapt, the biggest opportunities may come not from locking things down, but by opening them up. In a networked world, information, data and people flow through open channels between organizations. We are entering the post-social media era, where people are moving off centralized platforms and into a curated mosaic of niche, private, and cooperative spaces: Koops.

Built To Progress

While communities are built to connect, Koops are built to progress.

The old model of monolithic jobs with defined roles and responsibilities has been replaced with modular jobs that are constantly evolving and changing. In other words, work is being unbundled from employment. Finding communities of other independents is becoming a replacement for the company or team.

Culture Meets Squads At Work

For both full-timers and independents, career growth in a permissionless world is an increasingly modular and evolving process, vs. the hierarchal scales enabled by an industry of gatekeepers. As we become more specialized, we “move away from precarious self-sufficiency to safer mutual interdependence.” Innovation has allowed us to merge our economic selves - professional, skilled, competitive - with our public selves - civic, social, and personal. There is no longer a separation between professional development and personal development. All skills, experiences, and practices can be brought to bear on our professional and private lives. Who we are in work is who we are more generally.

Ideas jammed on in the Discord or Twitch stream are turned into cultural movements. What follows next is not simply execution, but something even more powerful — memetic virality. Brands will be created by squads, and they will not be tied to workplaces or organizations. A place where you never have to sell yourself because your contributions speak for you. You work is not assigned, it is guided by your inner voice. Koop is for collaborators, builders, and self-starters.

Self-Funded

Koops are funded by direct member investment. Crypto offers limitless options for bootstrapping. A group could use profits from selling NFTs, staking, completing bounties, and more to externalize their social products.

We plan on natively supporting all of these use cases, starting with NFTs. Early Koop members can use the surplus of NFT profits to fund launching their own product. Profits from the product are then used to build out a storefront, for example. This framework enables sustainable growth of both the businesses and communities they serve. Every social Koop will start investing to bootstrap funding events and projects.

Where We Are Today

NFTs are an asset in a shared treasury. Fluid user-owned networks, will collect NFTs as an accurate measure of not only their social capital, but also their cultural positioning. NFTs as a treasury asset allow for audiences to be built around the Koop, expanding its product base and external community. Token holders have an upside in the NFTs and the creators of the content NFTs. Each Koop is its own micro-economy, legitimized through contributions and credit.

Koops are owned and operated by their members. Members can be creators, or consumers, of the Koop’s products and services. Pooling resources for an evolving mission, determined by its members, allows Koops to remain flexible and scalable within their niche.

What We Believe

Everything we do starts with these questions: Why should Koops exist? Why should anyone care to use it? Why is collective ownership so important to us? Eventually, the “why” led us to three truths.

Community around cultural pieces.

1. Shared ownership is about community, not fractionalization. A shared treasury enables lower barriers to entry for highly-valuable assets. Owning an NFT means you have subscribed to the notion that ownership is intrinsically relational – value that is determined in the context of other relationships, associations, and connections.

2. We are building the blueprint for mutual organization, giving groups leverage to collect, invest, and catalyze cultural movements together. The squad is the user class for tooling we need today, yet few products enable groups to produce cooperatively and generate wealth together.

Collectivism > Individualism

1. To go further, go together. In collectivist cultures, groups are of primary importance—individuals are secondary. In these cultures, individuals acknowledge the contributions of others to their existence. They may sacrifice self-interest to promote the interest of the collective.

2. A bridge has yet to be built between collectivism and individualism, where the autonomy and sufficiency of the individual is enabled, while also promoting aligned values and in-groups. Interestingly enough, the pseudonymous nature of Web3 enables us to hold multiple identifies — to be a core contributor in multiple collectives.

3. Your friends become your coworkers. Your shared purpose and mission is backed by assets and projects that you hold total ownership of. Your ability to move across opportunities and interests is not bound by contractual or societal obligations.

“Every child is an artist. The problem is how we remain an artist once we've grown up”

1. A new generation of entrepreneurs want to build transformative and scalable businesses that align with their values and combat - rather than perpetuate - economic and race-based inequality.

2. Independents are people who work for themselves. Instead of a full time job, individuals will lean on a fluid portfolio of revenue streams. Individuals will work on projects that align with their beliefs and interests, enabled to spend energy on missions they stand by.

3. In traditional freelance, individuals support each other by sharing their networks, rates, leads, etc. There are many lessons to be learned from a collaborative ecosystem in which creatives are able to share resources and learnings. A collaborative economy will have an outsized opportunity to elevate underserved communities and provides avenues for wealth creation and distribution.

Our Promise

Koop is for doers and makers. Recent events have required all of us to reevaluate our relationship with time, work, and identity. Our hope is to inspire and enable you to be more autonomous, more fluid, and more collaborative in the way you spend, earn, and collect.

Our mission is to build a true extension for your craft. A curated home for your digital contributions, far away from social networks, bank statements or bounty boards. A place of utility as much as a place of energy. Because that’s all Koop is: A tool meant to help you generate abundance and achieve as collectives.

We expect our vision to evolve as our community grows, so we make these promises to you now:

We will uphold our responsibility

We aspire to offer conditions for connection, learning, and action to arise in a fluid and simple manner. Managing payments and being rewarded for your contributions should be an after thought. This will be accomplished by offering new modes of sharing resources — open, trustless, and transparent. We promise to have NO vanity metrics and NO social pressure.

We will work together

The current web is made to withhold information and influence you. The only way this changes is by working together. We are focused on building on top of existing infrastructure and collaborating through our own open-sourced technology. We aim to contribute an environment of co-creation.

We're in it for the long haul

We're an independent company who's built many other independent products. We only answer to you, our members and supporters. This allows us to grow slowly and carefully while ensuring our values are reflected in everything we do.