"DAOs are dead."
"Governance tooling has no business model."
"Decentralization was just regulatory theatre."

We think this diagnosis is wrong. Not because the symptoms aren't real, but because it confuses the failure of a specific product category with the failure of coordination itself.

Tally built a version of what governance tooling was understood to be: voting portals, delegation dashboards, proposal workflows. It served many users, but they couldn't build a sustainable VC-backed business. That fact deserves examination, not a eulogy for the entire field.

The Voting Portal Was Never the Product

The first generation of governance tooling did not play out as expected. But the deeper issue is that even where DAOs did thrive, the experience of participating in governance remained fundamentally broken. Voter turnout stayed low. Proposal quality was uneven. Treasury decisions were made by tiny fractions of tokenholders.

Voting portals can shine a spotlight on governance, but we need real innovation if the ecosystem is going to evolve.

What We've Been Building — and Why It's Different

At Lighthouse Labs, we've spent the past three years working at the intersection of mechanism design, identity infrastructure, and governance research. Not because governance tooling seemed like a good market opportunity, but because we believe the coordination layer for internet-native organisations hasn't been invented yet.

That conviction has produced work across several areas that, taken together, represent a fundamentally different approach to the problem.

ENS Metadata

If you can't describe what an organisation is, you can't govern it.

The Node Metadata Standard, currently in draft status as an ENSIP, introduces a composable schema for attaching structured metadata to ENS names. Think of it as a way for any entity represented by an ENS name or subname to also describe its role, capabilities, and relationships in a machine-readable format that lives on-chain.

This is more than just profiles and avatars, it's the precondition for governance that understands who is participating, in what capacity, and with what context. Without it, every governance interface is flying blind.

The foundations of this new standard are already out there and being discussed, especially within the context of debates about the future of agent identity architecture on ENS. It's our most recent contribution to the ecosystem, and it's the foundation everything else builds on.

The ENS Retrospective

We proposed one of the first major DAO retrospective’s together with James (🔥_🔥). What has since been produced by the Metagov team creates an empirical baseline for what in the past has been mostly anecdotal.  

AI Governance Assistance

Concurrent to this work, we ran AI-assisted grant evaluation experiments. Using language models to systematically assess SPP2 applications against consistent criteria, we explored the idea of automated or augmented screening to reduce operational burdens in decentralized organizations. The results weren't a replacement for human judgment, but they revealed how much can be done with the data we already have if you just run it through the right tools and processes.

We also implemented and improved upon the well-renowned Talk to the City method and ran it in parallel with the Retro to compare and contrast findings.

This research matters because it demonstrates something most governance teams skip: empirical accountability. If you're going to build tools for collective decision-making, you should first understand how collective decisions actually get made and where they break down.

Signals Protocol: Capturing Preference Intensity

Token-based, closed-list voting has been the centerpiece of collective decision-making for too long. Real-world experience so far has shown that forcing users into a binary “yes/no” choice results in difficult decisions and inflexible initiatives.

Using similar economic systems to allow voters to instead express a preference (and preference intensity) before moving to the final vote can expose true community sentiment and result in better-planned proposals going up for a vote.

This is what we provide with the Signals Protocol, which allows voters to temporarily lock up capital in support of their preferences. The result is better use of the “wisdom of the crowd” while the economic game theory of anonymous blockchains still works to enforce good behavior.

The Consolidation Ahead

We're clear-eyed about the market. Tally's closure will accelerate consolidation in governance tooling, and many teams are already moving to fill the gap. This is natural and healthy. The ecosystem needs multiple independent frontends and diverse approaches.

But we'd gently observe that most of the emerging responses to Tally's shutdown are variations on the same theme: better voting interfaces, more security monitoring, slicker dashboards. Although these are necessary, they are not sufficient. We need deeper structural reforms in our behaviors and an openness to experimentation if we truly believe that internet native organizations  have a viable future.

Lighthouse Labs builds coordination infrastructure for decentralised systems. Our contributions to Ethereum include Harbor Protocol, Signals Protocol, EGPL, and the ENS Metadata Standard. We are active contributors to ENS DAO governance and the broader Ethereum ecosystem.

The point is simple but profound: open source is not just about faster progress, it’s about who gets to participate, who benefits, and whether new inventions entrench inequality or spread opportunity.

Open Source Isn’t Enough To Protect The Commons

Ethereum was built on open source. Geth, Solidity, countless clients, rollup frameworks, infrastructure libraries -- all of it is free for anyone to use. That openness was, and still is, a strength. But the last five years have shown a new, unfortunate trend: EVM-compatible L1s forking Ethereum code wholesale, slapping on a new token, and capturing value without contributing a single cent back to the Ethereum commons.

• These chains don’t pay ETH for calldata or blobspace.

• They don’t strengthen Ethereum’s validator set.

• They don’t help build the infrastructure they rely on.

• They don't contribute back to core R&D

• All while Protocol Guild relies on donations to continue core development...

These extractive practices pose a risk to Ethereum’s open source development. Using open source software should be about participation, not exploitation.

One could argue that Ethereum's greatest value is the economic security it provides, and alternative L1s create a war of attrition on that underlying economic security.

We evaluated existing license permutations such as MIT, AGPL, BUSL + MIT and CopyFair and found that none of these licenses did enough to prevent the value of open source work from being siphoned off from the ecosystem.

The Case for an Ethereum General Public License ("EGPL")

We need a license that keeps software free for Ethereum — and only for Ethereum. Call it the Ethereum General Public License (EGPL). Ideally, it would have the following attributes:

• Free on Ethereum and aligned rollups. Anyone building on mainnet or a derivative that eventually pays fees to the Ethereum L1 gets the full benefits of open source.

• Pay if you’re parasitic. If you’re running a chain that relies on Ethereum’s code but doesn’t contribute anything back to the original Ethereum ecosystem, a commercial clause should be triggered.

• Copyleft by default. Improvements made in Ethereum’s commons stay in Ethereum’s commons.
  

Just as the AGPL responded to SaaS companies who exploited the GPL without contributing back, the EGPL responds to non-aligned L1s who exploit Ethereum’s public goods without reciprocity.

“Open Source Only” as a Style of Progress

Vitalik’s blog post mentioned above frames open source as a style of progress, not just a way to move faster. That’s exactly right. We don’t only care how fast Ethereum technology moves -- we care where it moves, and who it empowers.

Open source in Ethereum:

• Improves equality of access → anyone can deploy on mainnet.

• Improves equality of production → anyone can build clients, rollups, apps.

• Improves verifiability → code is auditable, forkable, trustless.

• Prevents lock-in → no one company controls the base layer.
  

The EGPL takes this ethos one step further: open source must also mean aligned with Ethereum’s public goods. If you’re building outside of that alignment, then you’re not part of the commons -- you’re a free rider.

Drawing Our Line

Ethereum’s strength has always come from its developers and its culture of radical openness. But openness doesn’t mean naivety. If we don’t draw lines, others will happily eat the fruits of the Ethereum commons without ever planting their own seeds.

• For Ethereum-aligned developers: EGPL keeps the promise of free software.

• For corporate chains and opportunists: EGPL makes them pay their share.

• For the community as a whole: EGPL creates a Schelling point for sustainable progress.
  

“I support it only if it’s open source” is a good start, but in Ethereum, we must go further.

A working draft of the license can be found here: https://github.com/0xLighthouse/egpl

If you have thoughts on this matter or can help amplify these ideas, please reach out to us or share this post in your community.

Many thanks to the individuals and groups who provided feedback on this to give us the confidence to publish this. If you would like to be named and credited please drop us a note and we will acknowledge you in the contributions.

We were then accepted into the Uniswap Hooks Incubator, and decided it was the perfect place to explore this concept. What if the tokens locked in a Signals Board could take the form of an NFT, and be traded on an AMM?

If we could create an NFT that represented the right to redeem the tokens once they become unlocked, that NFT could be thought of as a bond with no interest (also known as a zero-coupon bond).

The solution we built during the program borrows liquidity from a normal Uniswap pool to power our AMM for bond NFTs. We introduced an on-chain pricing algorithm so the AMM could provide accurate pricing for each bond instead of relying on supply and demand to determine the price. It even used the new Uniswap v4 Hooks to adjust fees for traders on the Uniswap pool, based on how much profit the AMM had generated. We called it the Bond Marketplace AMM.

Our solution was perhaps a bit over-engineered for providing a way to autonomously buy and sell NFT bonds, but we got a glimpse of how we could build new and powerful systems using bonds instead of simple token locking. At the end of the program, our innovation won us top prizes from the Uniswap Foundation and Arbitrum Stylus.

The power of bonds

Locking tokens is an essential building block for various crypto systems, including Signals. In many of them, however, it might be possible to allow the tokens to be transferred in their locked state without negating the point of them being locked.

One example is when on-chain organizations lock tokens into a vesting schedule when issuing grants or other funding. While effective at curbing short-term sell pressure, these mechanisms immobilize capital, leaving participants unable to respond to market conditions or life events.

We received a grant from Optimism’s Public Goods Retro Funding Round 6 (PGRF6) denoted in OP tokens, and when the grant was issued the price of OP was $1.70 per token. The price was roughly the same when our stream started 4 months later, but by the time the stream ended the token price had slipped to $0.64.

This wouldn’t have been a problem if we could have afforded to hold onto our tokens until the market recovered, but due to our financial situation we were forced to start selling as soon as the stream started, resulting in us receiving 32% less value than what we had budgeted for.

Optimism has distributed 60 million OP thus far, so we can only assume many others have had a similar experience to us.

What if we could have sold our locked tokens, while honoring Optimism’s preference that they not be sold on the open market?

Replacing traditional lockups with bonds

Some bond NFT (and token vesting) implementations already exist. One great example is Hedgey, which offers lots of customizable features for vesting and other parameters.

For our marketplace project, we created a simpler type of bond NFT without all the bells and whistles. We found that our use case was better served by a more basic token that simply represented ownership of the underlying, locked asset.

This allowed us to design an on-chain pricing algorithm that could determine the price of a particular bond based on the amount of underlying tokens and the time left to maturity. This became an essential component of our AMM, which could now price bonds autonomously in a way that guarantees any bonds purchased can be redeemed in the future for more than the price paid.

A user could sell their bond into the AMM for the going rate as determined by the algorithm. Over time the value of the bond increases, meaning if the bond were then resold by the AMM at any point, profit would be generated. If the bond reached maturity before being resold, it could be unlocked by the AMM, achieving maximum profit for liquidity providers.

Our Bond Marketplace AMM uses hooks to leverage Uniswap’s position as a market leader to gain access to much deeper liquidity than we would be able to access on our own. This was an early exploration into the concept of rehypothecation of liquidity.

Offering a level playing field for risk

Since bond properties are all available on-chain, anyone can write their own pricing algorithm to use with our system.Professional market makers could deploy strategies that cater to DAOs, yield farmers, and other buyers. Market forces could identify the optimal pricing strategy. This dynamic creates a true market for locked capital, one that can finally bring efficiency, flexibility, and expressiveness to what has traditionally been a rigid, top-down process.

Exploring the market dynamics

A bond marketplace like ours caters to the needs of all participants in the system:

Bond holders can sell their bonds before the underlying tokens are unlocked, for a market-determined price. Following our retro funding example above, this would have allowed us to access liquidity at a known exchange rate without having to risk future market volatility.

Bond buyers can essentially generate yield on their long-term token holdings, by using those tokens to buy discounted bonds and then simply waiting for the bonded tokens to unlock.

Bond issuers still achieve their goals that rely on locked tokens. In the example of DAOs paying out locked rewards, the underlying tokens are not being sold on the open market, which protects token price.

By tokenizing locked commitments as NFT Bonds and allowing them to trade freely in a secondary marketplace, we maintain the level of commitment while acknowledging the financial risk.

A new primitive for DAOs

Bond marketplaces can also open up powerful new tooling for the DAOs who are issuing bonds. DAOs can act as buyers of last resort, offering partial liquidity to contributors in volatile conditions. They can also shape controlled buyback programs, putting up protocol-owned liquidity to gradually reacquire their tokens at a discount, without requiring complex OTC deals.

What’s next?

For Signals, we believe using a bond NFT model could improve our system by allowing supporters of an initiative to sell their locked position based on shifting sentiment. Monitoring market activity could add a new layer to the metrics Signals exposes.

What token-locking systems have you seen that could be improved by using bond NFTs?

Tweet at us and let us hear about it!

Acknowledgments

Atrium Academy *Navigating the Uniswap v4 codebase would not have been possible without our Instructors and the DevRel support provided. Special thanks to @AtriumAcademy for providing us with support necessary to reach this point. *

We highly endorse and recommend the program to anyone considering deploying on Uniswap.

Uniswap The v4 hook design allows vendors like ourselves to leverage Uniswap’s position as a market leader to gain access to much deeper liquidity than we would be able to access on our own. This was an early exploration into the concept of rehypothecation of liquidity.

Arbitrum We had the chance to scratch the surface of what is possible with Arbitrum Stylus. The runtime unlocks calculations that facilitate a new family of algorithms would even struggle on a L2 blockchain.

Want more? Join our Community where we discuss and plan practical steps to shape the future of Governance and on-chain organisations.

Understanding participation in Web3 governance

During our time spent engaging with the top Web3 governance ecosystems, we experienced first hand the struggles communities face caused by a lack of participation. Core users who are passionate about governance are naturally motivated to participate, but for the large majority of token holders, the benefits of participation don’t outweigh the effort required. In an attempt to improve the effort-reward ratio, it is now quite common for DAOs and ecosystems to offer financial incentives to encourage enough participation to keep things operating smoothly. According to a 2025 DAOStar report, some DAOs even spend more than $1M USD per year on paid delegate programs, which proves it is an important issue.

We also have seen situations in which voter behaviour is heavily influenced by unintentional game theory. Early statements of support can carry reputational risk, which leads to all the votes coming in at the last minute with no room for discussion or amendment.

Encouraging delegates and voters to express their stance as early as possible is a large benefit to these decision-making systems, but there is currently no common strategy for achieving this.

Motivating high-quality participation in Signals

Even though Signals is not meant to be a voting system, it will most likely face similar challenges to those mentioned above. We decided to offer built-in ways to incentivize the type of participation that would avoid the issues most commonly encountered when using the current systems. We also kept a few questions in mind when working on our solution, partly inspired by some of the most common problems faced by DAOs:

• What does it take to get the majority of community members to participate in decision-making?

• What does high-quality participation look like? Is it enough to reward all participation, or can we structure the incentives to promote a certain type of participation?

• How can we prevent our incentives structure from encouraging malicious behavior or being exploited?

We ended up producing two mechanisms designed to deliver financial incentives based on the successful actioning of a Signals initiative. Both are intended to accentuate the existing game theory aspects of Signals: supporting initiatives that accurately represent wider community sentiment is rewarded, and supporting unpopular or self-serving initiatives is penalized through missed opportunity.

Mechanism 1: General participation incentives

The first mechanism encourages participation across the board, by paying out financial rewards directly to users who support initiatives that go on to be actioned by the community. An amount of tokens can be added to the rewards pool of a Signals Board (funded from a DAO’s treasury, perhaps), and the Board can be configured to automatically share the rewards with supporters of any initiative that is actioned.

The indicators exposed by Signals are more valuable if support is received early, and so a supporter’s share of the rewards are heavily influenced by how early they added their support. The formula for this weighting can be customized to find the optimal balance.

This type of incentive will have the following benefits:

• More token holders will participate, due to the effort-reward ratio being improved: earn easy money by simply supporting the best initiatives

• Adding support early earns more rewards. Influential community members will now compete to be the first to make their opinions known, instead of waiting until the last minute

• Supporting an unpopular initiative might mean missing out on one that earns a reward, resulting in more intentional expressions of support

If DAOs are already dedicating a budget towards paid delegates, perhaps they could instead devote some of those funds towards the general participation incentives pool. While encouraging wider participation, it could also work to redistribute tokens to the most active and representative users.

Mechanism 2: Sponsored initiative incentives

The second mechanism allows entities to contribute rewards to a specific initiative, making it more appealing to supporters. If the initiative expires, the rewards are returned to the original contributor. If the initiative is actioned, the rewards are shared between initiative supporters, the DAO treasury, and the protocol according to a pre-configured ratio.

The ratio of how the rewards are distributed between these three buckets can be adjusted to incentivize a desired type of behaviour. A common configuration might look something like:

• 80% paid to DAO treasury

• 15% distributed to supporters of the initiative

• 5% donated to the protocol to fund further development

This type of incentive will have the following benefits:

• Sponsors or high-profile supporters of an initiative can show their dedication by contributing rewards from their own personal funds

• External entities that want to establish a special relationship with the DAO through an initiative can prove up front that they are ready to contribute the funds necessary to carry out the initiative

• An initiative that has a large amount of support can crowd-source additional rewards, allowing them to amplify the greater community sentiment

Amplifying Signals’ fundamental design

Signals has been intentionally designed to extract indicators of community sentiment that are meaningful and useful. Users are not able to vote against initiatives; they can only support an idea they agree with, or submit their own. Participating has an opportunity cost, in the form of locked tokens, which filters out weakly-held opinions. Smaller token holders are able to compete with whales, better reflecting the preferences of the community as a whole.

Rewards give community members an extra reason to participate and increase the opportunity cost introduced by time-locking tokens to show support. This allows Signal to be even more effective at surfacing community sentiment and protecting from brigading, manipulation, and erroneous signals due to apathy.

If you would like to learn more or get involved, please reach out.

Overview

Introduction
Motivation
Mechanism design
  Initiatives, not Proposals
  Token-Locking
  Calculating Support
  Decay
  Actioning Initiatives (or Not)
  Examples of Support and Acceptance Threshold
  Endorsements (Optional)
Related systems
  Conviction Voting
  Commitment Voting
  veToken Systems
So what's next?
References

Introduction

Signals is an on-chain protocol that converts latent community sentiment into a real-time, ranked idea board of DAO initiatives. Inspired by Conviction voting, Commitment voting and veToken Systems like Curve, Aragon and Velodrome, it lets members lock their existing governance tokens for a period of time to signal their support for what they think is most important. This token-time locking, coupled with configurable decay curves and acceptance thresholds, equips decentralized organizations with a transparent, mathematically-grounded mechanism for continuous sensemaking.

We envision this protocol becoming an invaluable tool for on-chain organizations to gain clarity on structural changes and where to allocate capital. Whilst also unlocking a new set of utility for their underlying governance token.

Motivation

After a decade of experimenting with on-chain governance, most DAOs still struggle to turn community intent into timely, accountable action. Token-based voting commonly employed by DAOs can capture a binary "yes or no" on formalized proposals, but it does little to surface preference intensity of community participants. This makes it a poor tool for uncovering what should be worked on next or how strongly members care about different initiatives.

Many DAOs have tried to solve these shortcomings through structure and process, but this has resulted in many familiar frustrations:

• Endless Discord and forum threads with no clear next steps

• Committees that drift or concentrate power

• Fragmented knowledge bases that deter newcomers

• Social pressure that favors incumbents over fresh ideas

Although today’s largest DAOs commonly make use of Web3 tools for trustless voting and treasury management, for everything else they are relying on traditional systems which bring with them the bureaucracy of yesterday—and it is hindering their ability to run efficiently.

By leveraging community members’ preference intensity as expressed through time-lock commitments, Signals constructs a dynamic, real-time idea board where the most widely-held opinions rise naturally to the top.

Mechanism design

Initiatives, not Proposals

Instead of proposals, Signals deals with “Initiatives” — an idea, course of action, or other concept that is seeking support from the community. Participants submit Initiatives to a Signals space (called a “Board”) which has been configured by the DAO and usually revolves around a specific theme. A DAO can have multiple Boards, all configured differently and for different purposes. Board configurations are all on-chain, so they could be configured trustlessly as the result of a DAO vote or existing trust models.

Token-Locking

Users lock up their existing tokens in support of a specific Initiative and for a specified duration, which demonstrates a genuine commitment through opportunity cost. Voting against an Initiative is not possible. By eliminating low-conviction indicators, every signal becomes an important one.

Boards will typically be configured to use DAO governance tokens, though any asset (token or stablecoin) could be specified. Each lockup is minted as a transferrable NFT bond which allows the holder to redeem the underlying tokens once the lock expires, opening the door for secondary markets and other qualitative measurements.

Calculating Support

Signals handles time as “Epochs,” a configurable base unit of time that represents the level of urgency most appropriate for a particular Board. Users who choose to lock their tokens for more than one Epoch contribute additional support to their chosen Initiative. The formula for calculating support can be customized as needed, but a standard starting point could look like the following, which we feel would provide enough flexibility for the majority of use cases:

$$\huge S = T \times D^{k}$$

$$\text{Where}: $$

$$ S $$ = The starting amount of support provided

$$ T $$ = The number of tokens locked up

$$ D $$ = The lock duration, denoted as a number of Epochs

$$ k $$ = Exponential bonus for longer lockups

Calculating support in this manner, and displaying the details, provides several important properties:

1. Users with fewer tokens can compete with larger holders, who are less likely to  commit to a longer lock duration

2. Communities can compare the levels of conviction shown by small vs large holders

3. Support measurements become more resilient to manipulation

4. Time becomes a democratizing factor in governance

Decay

The amount of support provided by an individual lockup decays over time, to ensure that indicators of support remain current and relevant. Each Board can configure the decay curve formula that is used to calculate each Initiative’s support value at the current time. Decay curves could be linear, exponential, or something much more complicated.

Calculating the total amount of current support behind an Initiative is expressed as the sum of support provided by all lockups, given the current time:

$$\text{Where}: $$

• $$ CurrentSupport_i(t) $$ = An Initiative's support at time $$ t $$

• $$ i $$ = The Initiative we are assessing

• $$ Locks_i $$ = The set of locks supporting this Initiative

• $$ \ell $$ = One specific lock in that set

• $$ Weight(\ell, t) $$ = Individual value of support a lockup provides at time $$ t $$

Using decay introduces a powerful governance dynamic:

1. Initiatives must maintain ongoing support to remain relevant

2. Abandoned Initiatives naturally lose prominence

3. Early support provides a head start, but not permanent advantage

4. Decay creates a cost to waiting, which aligns contributors around timely action

5. Users are further dissuaded from supporting unpopular Initiatives

Actioning Initiatives (or Not)

Boards are configured with a target level of support, called the “acceptance threshold”. Any Initiative that currently has enough support to exceed this threshold can be “actioned,” in which case the Initiative is closed and all tokens locked up in support of that Initiative are immediately unlocked. This early unlock incentivizes users to only support Initiatives they think will be popular. It is up to DAOs to decide how to treat initiatives that have been actioned.

Actioning could be configured to happen automatically once the criteria is met, or it could require manual activation by a committee, DAO vote, or other mechanism.

Examples of Support and Acceptance Threshold

Below you will find some simulations of the manner in which support can decay over time, with each color representing a contribution from a different supporter.

Endorsements (Optional)

For DAOs that support delegating voting power, delegates would not be able to fully participate in Signals because they do not directly own the tokens that are entrusted to them. To account for this, a Board can be configured to make use of “Endorsements,” a binary signal of support that can be issued by a user based on their amount of delegated voting power.

The Board could require all Initiatives to receive a certain number of Endorsements in addition to locked up support before they can be actioned. There could also be a maximum limit to the number of Endorsements each Initiative can receive, which encourages delegates to act early, to avoid missing out on the reputation gained from publicly supporting a popular Initiative.

Related systems

Conviction Voting

Conviction Voting lets holders stake without fixed locks; conviction builds the longer tokens stay committed and can be re-allocated at any time (which resets the build-up) Proposals are automatically executed—often with treasury funds released—once time-weighted conviction crosses an adaptive threshold tied to the amount requested.

Conviction Voting translates persistent, growing conviction directly into binding, resource-allocating decisions.

Commitment Voting

Commitment Voting is an aspect of proposal/election voting in which winners prove their dedication to their choice. A voter commits to locking up a number of tokens for a period of time, which determines the voting power added to the voter’s selected candidate. If the voter’s selection wins the election, their tokens continue to be locked up as committed; voters who supported the opposing side immediately have their committed tokens returned to them.

Commitment Voting channels intensity into a binding choice where victory comes with an opportunity cost and there are few downsides to supporting a losing candidate.

veToken Systems

Curve’s veCRV, Aragon OSx gauges, and Velodrome have users lock up tokens for a duration of time as a prerequisite for receiving voting power. Longer lockups provide more voting power, which can be used in all votes for the duration. These systems allow users to convey their intensity of preference for participating in voting in general, but does not convey intensity of preference on specific votes.

So what's next?

The Signals proof of concept was developed during the Arbitrum Collabtech Hackathon, where it won first place. We continued to work on our Bond Marketplace (a Signals sub-system) during the Uniswap Hooks Incubator which won prizes from Arbitrum and the Uniswap Foundation.

All smart contracts and web app dashboard code is open source and can be found at https://github.com/0xLighthouse/signals

We are now seeking the brightest minds to work with us on producing a whitepaper to formally prove the most interesting properties of the protocol:

• Capturing voter preference intensity

• Opportunity cost as sufficient risk

• Locking mechanisms improving sybil resistance

• Gamifying Endorsements to trustlessly reward and build reputation

• Empowering smaller voting blocks increases inclusivity

These collective properties are poised to solve some of Ethereum’s biggest challenges when it comes to on-chain sensemaking and capital allocation.

If you are interested in Signals please reach out.

References

Conviction voting, https://github.com/1Hive/conviction-voting-cadcad/blob/master/README.md

Curve Finance. 2025. Understanding veCRV. [online] Curve Resources. Available at: https://resources.curve.fi/reward-gauges/understanding-vecrv

DAOstar. 2025. DAO Delegate Incentive Programs: How to build for the future. [online] Available at: https://daostar.org/reports/delegate.pdf

Curve DAO (n.d.) ‘Locked CRV (veCRV) – Overview’, Curve Resources. Available at: https://resources.curve.fi/vecrv/overview/

Berg el al. (2020) Commitment Voting: A Mechanism for Intensity of Preference Revelation and Long-Term Commitment in Blockchain Governance . http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3742435

Emmett, J. (2019) ‘Conviction Voting: A Novel Continuous Decision Making Alternative to Governance’, Medium (Giveth blog), 3 July. Available at: https://medium.com/giveth/conviction-voting-a-novel-continuous-decision-making-alternative-to-governance-aa746cfb9475

Khezr et al. (2024) ‘Voting with Time Commitment for Decentralized Governance: Bond Voting as a Sybil-Resistant Mechanism’, Management Science (forthcoming). SSRN pre-print, doi: 10.2139/ssrn.4259599. Available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4259599

Aragon (2024) ‘Introducing Mode Governance’, Aragon Blog, 16 October. Available at: https://blog.aragon.org/introducing-mode-governance/

Velodrome (2022) ‘Velodrome: Launch. Part 1 – Overview’, Medium, 19 May. Available at: https://medium.com/@VelodromeFi/velodrome-launch-part-1-25b38120224a

Security best practices dictate that assets of significant value should be stored in a multisig wallet. In this regard, Safe has become the industry standard on Ethereum, ensuring the highest level of security for DAOs and organisations.

Meanwhile, Snapshot has established itself as the most widely adopted gas-less voting mechanism on Ethereum, empowering a diverse range of communities to govern efficiently.

The Challenge

For those holding governance tokens in a Safe, voting has historically been a logistical challenge. Users must:

• Connect a signing wallet

• Access a desktop device

• Load a Snapshot-compatible interface within Safe

• Coordinate across multiple time zones and communication channels

These barriers have made governance participation cumbersome, leading to lower engagement and inefficiencies in decision-making.

Safe DAO and OBRA

Safe DAO runs a program called OBRA, which funds development across various strategic tracks. One of these, “Strategy 5: Increase Governance Participation,” aims to increase the governance participation in SafeDAO.Given Safe conducts its Governance with Snapshot. We explored how users who store their governance tokens in a Safe can vote using an alternate mobile interface.

Thus increasing the diversity of clients where members can choose how to participate and stay informed.

Lighthouse: Bringing Native Safe Voting to Snapshot

At Lighthouse, we recognised this gap and have built a solution that makes it simple and intuitive to vote on Snapshot proposals with a Safe.

We’re excited to say this feature is now Generally Available to all users. Big thanks to the Safe community for giving a new provider the chance to prove ourselves.

Get Early Access

Be among the first to experience this new capability and please reach out with feedback as we we continue refining the experience.

Check out these video previews to see the feature in action:

The Best Mobile Voting Experience for EVM Governance

The Lighthouse Governance app delivers best-in-class voting for EVM-based governance systems on both iOS and Android. We support Snapshot and Governor frameworks, making it the most convenient way to vote on mobile, whether you hold governance tokens in an EOA or a Safe.

As the first native app offering Safe voting on Snapshot, we are pioneering a new era of on-chain governance accessibility.

Next — we are exploring bringing this for Governor flavoured contracts. If you can help with funding features likes this or have feedback for us please get in touch!

“To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller

Preamble

On-chain governance enables democratisation in a way not seen before, but in order to realise this potential, it is important for governance tokens (and, therefore, decision-making power) to be distributed amongst the ecosystem in a way that accurately represents each participant’s role. We can assume the majority of communities would want decision-making power distributed proportionately according to participation, without casual participants being left out.

This balance is hard to achieve when governance tokens also need to have monetary value in order to take advantage of tokenomics. Many projects try to achieve wider distribution through highly-publicised token sales or large-scale airdrops and incentive schemes, however these initiatives often fail to have the intended effect. A study titled The Illusion of Democracy—Why Voting in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Is Doomed to Fail found that a large number of DAOs are still plagued by centralised decision-making power, and they highlighted one major DAO in which 66% of voting outcomes could have been influenced by four or fewer voters.

The core problem here seems to be rooted in the mixing of decision-making power together with economic value in a single token. Market forces will naturally trend towards greater accumulation by the wealthy, and yet it is beneficial for decision-making power to be more equitably distributed. As long as tokens have value they will be influenced by these market forces, however we can continually push back on these effects through a better design for token issuance.

As 0xJustice.eth states in his recent thoughts on Ethereum, “economic equality is a phantom”, and we owe it to ourselves to reconsider the norms commonly accepted throughout the crypto ecosystem.

An Introduction to Epoch-Based Issuance

In an earlier essay we presented the view that most crypto projects can be thought of as network economies, and as economies, they require constant refinement in order to respond and adapt to market forces.

The crypto ethos often aspires to diverge from legacy finance, with many crypto projects creating a fixed supply of tokens in an attempt to mimic the “sound money” principles of assets like Bitcoin. The downside is, this requires them to try to predict the lifetime requirement of their token allocations before the project is even launched. Conversely, traditional corporations employ ongoing share issuance which allows them to adjust decision-making power as the situation evolves. Since these companies are also successful at simultaneously having their shares represent financial value and decision-making power, perhaps there is still a lesson to be learned from them. It would seem irrational for a traditional company to start with all their shares allocated for the next decade, so why is this considered the norm for crypto projects?

Our Approach

Taking the best of both worlds, we would like to propose a system in which governance tokens are continually issued over multiple epochs, with the space between each epoch serving as a discrete period for adjusting allocation parameters through formal voting.

Within each Epoch we identify relevant stakeholder groups based on the needs of the project:

• Founders should have the power to enact their early vision

• Investors bring the starting/ongoing capital

• Labourers spent time on community efforts and should be compensated for their contributions

• End users are the ultimate beneficiaries of the community and indicate which activities should be prioritised

• A treasury holds additional assets owned by the community

• And other categories, as required

For each new epoch, criteria for allocating tokens and determining stakeholder groups could be adjusted based on learnings from the previous period. The resulting decision could then be enshrined on-chain to provide the unique transparency and accountability made possible by blockchain tech. Any fluctuations in expectations across these groups could become feedback for subsequent epochs.

We believe this type of system would allow decision-making power to be shifted towards those who are most actively providing value at any given time. Investors and speculators who wish to maintain their share of economic value would be best served by actively participating in the ecosystem, which will surely make the community stronger and more valuable as a result.

Modelling Example Scenarios

Our goal with this article is not to authoritatively prescribe a specific setup for token issuance, but instead, demonstrate that epoch-based issuance will, in theory, allow a community to achieve a better distribution of decision-making power over time. To test this, we came up with multiple token issuance schemes based on common narratives, and modelled how the distribution amongst stakeholder groups for each would change over the course of 6 epochs.

In our modelling, each scenario aims to deploy 100MM tokens over 36 months, with adjustments made to stakeholder allocations at the end of each epoch:

The Baseline Model represents a generic template for token issuance. It features a fairly even distribution across token holders, and issues more tokens to end users and community participants with less going to founders and early investors.

The Community-Centric model prioritises rapid distribution and broad participation. It implements accelerated vesting schedules across all stakeholder groups while directing a larger share of tokens to labor contributors and end-users. This variant encourages wider participation by accommodating more founders and contributors, and uses shorter early epochs to achieve faster initial distribution. It notably reduces institutional investor allocation in favour of community ownership.

The Institutional Focus model takes a more conservative approach, emphasising controlled distribution and concentrated ownership. It employs significantly slower vesting schedules and allocates higher portions to founders and investors. This variant maintains fewer (but larger) stakeholders in each category, distributes tokens evenly across epochs, and retains a larger treasury allocation. It also sets more conservative targets for user growth, prioritising stability over rapid expansion.

The Progressively Democratised model implements a planned transition from centralised to decentralised control. It begins highly centralised with founder and investor control, then orchestrates a dramatic shift toward community ownership through back-loaded token distribution. This variant features exponential community growth targets and quick vesting for community tokens, deliberately engineering a progression from concentrated to distributed ownership over time.

The Balanced Growth model emphasises stability and predictability in token distribution. It implements even allocation across stakeholder groups and maintains steady, consistent vesting schedules. This variant follows linear or geometric growth patterns and maintains a larger treasury to ensure stability. By front-weighting token distribution while focusing on sustainable growth rates, it aims to achieve balanced, long-term development without favouring any           particular stakeholder group.

The results of our modelling is below, as we look at different metrics to measure the effectiveness of epoch-based issuance. We used cadCAD to build our simulations and have a (currently closed) Github repository where we would like to gather feedback from the community and iterate on our methodology. While we prepare the repo to be open-sourced, please join our guild to obtain access.

Equality of Token Distribution

To start, we want to look at the distribution of tokens between community participants. If the goal is to avoid situations in which a small number of people are able to dictate the outcomes of community decisions, we would hope to see tokens become more fairly distributed amongst community participants over time.

Distribution of Influence

If we run the HHI calculations again, looking at stakeholder groups to assess their respective market share, we can see how each scenario accomplishes its intended goal of shifting decision-making power to certain demographics over time:

Conclusion

Tokens are more than just a financial instrument—they also embody governance power. These attributes are deeply intertwined, and any system that leverages tokens for decision-making must recognise that market dynamics can influence governance outcomes. Ensuring that economic value does not distort decision-making power requires continuous refinement in token distribution.

Network economies are inherently dynamic and must adapt to remain relevant. A rigid approach to token issuance can lead to stagnation, misaligned incentives, or excessive centralisation. By contrast, a flexible model—one that allows governance to steer issuance according to evolving needs—offers a more sustainable path forward.

Epoch-based emissions provide a structured yet adaptable framework for distributing governance power. By leveraging governance mechanisms to adjust token distribution over time, projects can optimise for inclusivity and decentralisation while mitigating the risk of entrenched control by early stakeholders. This periodic reassessment ensures that decision-making power remains aligned with those actively contributing to the ecosystem.

If you have any thoughts on epoch-based emissions, including ideas for the types of metrics that should be collected and leveraged to adjust emissions trajectory, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.

Supplementary Reading

1. Tan et al. (2024). Open problems in daos. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19201

2. Harrigan et al. (2023). Emergent Outcomes of the veToken Model. https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.17589

3. Liu, Xaun (2024). The Illusion of Democracy—Why Voting in Decentralized Autonomous Organizations Is Doomed to Fail https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4441178

4. Hall, Andy (2024) Liquid democracy in the wild, https://a16zcrypto.com/posts/videos/liquid-democracy-in-the-wild/

5. Hall et al (2024) What Happens When Anyone Can Be Your Representative? Studying the Use of Liquid Democracy for High-Stakes Decisions in Online Platforms https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/working-papers/what-happens-when-anyone-can-be-your-representative-studying-use

6. Chain et al. (2024). Measuring the concentration of power in Optimism, - https://gov.optimism.io/t/measuring-the-concentration-of-power-in-the-collective/8956

7. https://coffee-cheap-marten-178.mypinata.cloud/ipfs/QmV9hQxERHU137e1DD2ex2Eiev5BmkUHNmTjdxV9fpRfzd

8. Austgen et al (2023). DAO Decentralization: Voting-Bloc Entropy, Bribery, and Dark DAOs https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.03530

Traditional governance systems — both on-chain and off-chain — often reduce complex community sentiment to simple yes/no votes, missing the nuanced signals that reflect where people truly stand.

The Challenge

Communities thrive on voluntary participation and open dialogue. Yet this freedom comes with inherent complexities:

• Different opinions and personal interests create friction

• Asymmetric information leads to misalignment

• Traditional voting mechanisms miss subtle but crucial sentiment

• Collective decision-making can stall without proper coordination tools

• Populism favours the loudest voices

Introducing Signals

Signals addresses the Ideation phase of the governance stack. By consolidating knowledge and feedback, the protocol ensures that every community member—regardless of resources—has an opportunity to contribute meaningful proposals that drive collective progress.

How It Works

At its core, Signals enables token holders meeting configured thresholds to propose initiatives. Support for these initiatives comes through a token-locking mechanism, where users can amplify their support by locking up their tokens for a longer period of time.

This design choice enables smaller holders to compete meaningfully with larger holders, creating a more balanced power dynamic. Locked tokens remain in the contract until the initiative is accepted or expired.

Initiatives quantify support using time-based decay, this creates a dynamically ranked system, ensuring that current community sentiment is accurately reflected. A built-in reward system incentivises thoughtful participation, with trustless distribution for accepted initiatives.

The protocol is designed for flexibility and broad adoption. Compatible with any EVM network, communities can deploy their own contract instances with their own configuration including ERC20 token selection, thresholds, and reward settings. This adaptability ensures the protocol can serve diverse community needs.

Real-World Applications

Signals fills a gap that currently exists in many crucial stages of community governance.

In early discussions, it allows communities to test proposal support and avoid putting too much energy into unpopular or unnecessary directions. For community roadmapping, it provides a structured way to gauge interest in new initiatives and plan strategic directions based on actual stakeholder sentiment.

The protocol also enables participants to build a reputation through transparent contributions, and offers rewards for valuable community input. When analysing community sentiment after the fact, a much deeper and more robust view of the data is made possible by the additional dimensions of lockup size and duration, paired with participant reputations and comments.

Here are a few possibilities of what we’re excited about:

• Temperature checks with on-chain discourse and versioning that allow DAOs to iterate on initiatives before a formal governance process begins

• Interoperable governance coordination, communities, councils and smaller groups can fund initiatives with smaller experiments.

• Cross-chain governance coordination, enabling communities spread across multiple networks to align their decision-making and maintain consistent strategic direction.

• Aggregated on-chain reputation-based systems that identify and empower effective leaders and contributors across multiple communities

• On-chain participant data

• On-chain allocation methods, creating direct paths from community ideation to resource allocation

Research and Vision

Signals is more than a governance tool; it is a new primitive for the future of decentralised coordination.

By facilitating and capturing nuanced sentiment on-chain, Signals fosters a more collaborative and (on-chain) data driven ecosystem for DAOs and digital communities.

We field tested our idea and won the Arbitrum CollabTech hackathon and got accepted into the Uniswap Hook Incubator Q1-25.

https://www.rndao.io/collabtech

https://atrium.academy/uniswap/course

So what’s next?

Learn more

• Github, https://github.com/0xLighthouse/signals

• Demo, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKchm2MFXWA

Talk to Us

Mint this article to access our Telegram with Guild

Support Us

As a relatively new project, we failed to make a dent any material impact in the latest Octant round. Please consider locking some GLM to support us and other amazing projects in future rounds.

—

Signals is under active development and looking to run pilots with forward thinking organisations*. If you can help or just want to say hi, drop us a line at hello@lighthouse.cx*

"Do not be ashamed of help. Accept it as it is offered, and give thanks for it.” — Marcus Aurelius

At Lighthouse, we are grateful to be encouraged and supported by forward-thinking organisations, and we would like to acknowledge some of the recent programs and campaigns we have participated in.

RnDAO <> Arbitrum CollabTech Hackathon — Signals 📡

In a hackathon that attracted 160 builders from all around the world, we were pleased to take first place 🥇 with Signals, a brand new protocol we have been discussing internally for some time. We’ll talk more about this in a subsequent post.

For now have a quick look at our demo presented by James.

The hackathon ran for a month, and the team put in extra hours to bring our idea to life and get some real-world feedback with industry leaders.

CollabTech (as the spiritual successor to “DAO tooling“) is gaining momentum, with even Vitalik making reference to it in his recent talk at Devcon.

https://x.com/i/status/1861058820325147109

We are excited to share more on this in the coming weeks.

Here be… Unicorns??

Hot on our win, we turned to the community to share our results with potential collaborators to find further support in the development of this protocol.

The conversations are still ongoing, and if you are interested in participating please reach out, but one development we can share is that we are excited to be joining the January Cohort of the Uniswap Hook Incubator.

If you are wondering what Uniswap Hooks have to do with governance, keep your eyes peeled for a future update.

Gitcoin #GG22

Gitcoin is primarily known for its efforts for supporting Open Source Software (“OSS“) and has recently broadened its messaging to Fund what matters.

Given our native governance client is a public good, we were pleased to be accepted in both categories we applied to: “Web3 Infra & Apps“ and “dApps and Apps“. However, we could only choose one category (sorry reviewers) so given what we have delivered so far, “dApps and Apps“ it was. For more on what we are doing on the infrastructure side, make sure you are subscribed to this blog where we will expand on this in a future update.

Our inaugural round was a learning experience in how to position ourselves in Web3, but the real takeaway was learning about the diverse set of builders out there, pushing to create a better future. When the round closed we had ~70 people who extended their support via a donation. THANK YOU! Believe me, as bootstrapped builders…

• View our Gitcoin builder profile

• Read the GG22 impact report

• Shoutout to the Grow/regen community for hosting all the shill spaces on X.

Optimism #retrofunding

Retro funding is Optimism's premier grants program where projects are rewarded based on the belief that Impact equals Profit. Having developed and launched our native governance client over the evaluation period, we were ecstatic to finally be accepted and recognised as a forward-looking project. This again was an awesome morale boost for the team, and a step forward in increasing awareness for the product.

For retro-funding six, Arnold (1a35e1.eth) was also selected as a guest voter and had the opportunity to see how things work as a reviewer. (Of course, we removed ourselves from scoring where there was a conflict of interest)

If you would like to catch up on how the collective is currently thinking about allocating capital, we highly recommend you check out these threads:

https://gov.optimism.io/t/retro-funding-6-voting-rational-thread-optional/9240/1

https://gov.optimism.io/t/lessons-learned-from-two-years-of-retroactive-public-goods-funding/9239/1

The collective is a testament to continuous iteration, reflection and improvement. We are excited to continue to drive impact and support the Superchain, and are looking forward to seeing the outcome of this round.

• Shoutout to Dan and Rosmari from OptimismFractal for giving projects a space to highlight their work.

• Shoutout to all the Guest Voters and Reviewers in Round 6

• View accepted projects in Round Six

SAFE DAO - OBRA progress

We have also been making leaps and bounds in getting SAFE multisigs to work on mobile wallets with Snapshot- and Governor-based systems. Tiny peek here. This will be an industry first once it’s ready.

If you vote in Snapshot or Governor communities using a SAFE and would like to be one of the first people to have access to this tech — please reach out.

Fin.

The future of on-chain governance is exciting, and we’re just getting started. Let’s build it together! If you want your DAO to join the Lighthouse platform, reach out to us at hello@lighthouse.cx.

Stay tuned — there’s so much more to come. 🌐 ✨

If you are still reading, check out Arnold’s recent article about the future of network economies.

https://paragraph.xyz/@1a35e1/on-network-economies

Over the summer, we took a brief pause from social media to recharge, reconnect with loved ones, and dive deep into refining our product strategy for the remainder of the year. Now, we’re back and more energised than ever!

Here’s an update on what has happened since.

Fresh UX: We’ve updated our onboarding flow to better welcome new users, and we’ve added a new voting interface that’s intuitive, sleek, and built for the future.

Best-in-class mobile voting: Our latest updated are now live on both iOS and Android, offering seamless in-app voting for major on-chain organisations such as Snapshot, NOUNs, Purple, Uniswap and Optimism.

These strategic implementations showcase our team’s ability to work across multiple EVM chains (Mainnet, Base, Optimism) and handle complex variations on variants of Governor standard (i.e Noun-ish/Nouns Builder, Governor Alpha, Governor Bravo and Governor Agora variants).

Exciting new collaborations: We’ve made significant strides with major DAOs eager to trial our platform and create innovative experiences for their communities. 🤫

Milestone achievement: We’re thrilled to announce that we’ve won our first-ever grant, awarded by SAFE DAO! This funding will help us deliver an even better mobile experience for users who vote using SAFE.

Feedback & education: While feedback from organisations like NOUNs and Optimism has been positive, we recognise the need to further educate both the community and experts on the vast potential of these technological advancements.

Media: Arnold had the pleasure of speaking on a panel at Zu Village Georgia, alongside Stablelab and Mezzanine, where we shared insights and explored the future of decentralised governance. Arnold also appeared on Just DAO It! with Adam Miller, Founder of MiDAO,

New frontiers - collaborations with artists: We’re partnering with artists to blend the act of minting with our technology in unprecedented ways.

https://opensea.io/assets/0x800790544565997428bEBdCB1886859fcDAB9c2c/1

https://opensea.io/assets/0x800790544565997428bEBdCB1886859fcDAB9c2c/2

Tip: If you mint tokens from any of our verified collections, there is a good chance they will offer unique benefits further down the line...

We’ve also learned some valuable lessons during this period.

Many people don’t understand what Lighthouse offers. This is on us, and we will be making a more considered effort to explain our suite of services. We are not just a voting client; we are a two-sided ecosystem which empowers voters to more effectively participate in governance, and also enables on-chain organisations to more effectively benefit from that increase in participation.

The industry is starting to feel the lack of critical infrastructure required to take DAO governance to the next level, and hopefully we can help everyone see how we fill that gap.

Moving forward, we are hoping to work on articles which explore topics such as:

• Inactive delegates and voter apathy.

• Proposal fatigue and how to amplify community signals for better decision-making.

• Proposal deliberation

• New Governance tokenomics

The future of on-chain governance is exciting, and we’re just getting started. Let’s build it together! If you want your DAO to join the Lighthouse platform, reach out to us at hello@lighthouse.cx.

Stay tuned — there’s so much more to come. 🌐 ✨

New website

https://lighthouse.cx/

We were struggling to communicate the scope of our offering, so we decided to update our website.

We reworked our information architecture from the ground up and created a new section called "Use Cases" where we outline how our product can be used from the perspective of different stakeholders.

• Community members

• Delegates

• DAOs

• Creators

To inject some flair into the website we also commissioned Diana aka ilithya.rocks to explore how our brand could be represented in a more playful way. We are very happy with the results and you can explore see the results within the products section on the website.

In the near future we shall release some derivative generative NFTs, to celebrate the awesome art. Holders of our existing NFTs will get preferential access to these items.

Native mobile app updates

Only download from the official stores via https://lighthouse.cx

Governor support

OpenZeppelin's governor contracts have led on-chain governance for a long time. However most popular deployments of these contracts are not driven from a factory contract.

Which means there are subtle differences in the way they are deployed, and once they have been upgraded they further diverge from the original contract.

This is natural and expected, but it makes it hard to surface the subtleties across these contracts in a way that is useful to users, thus posing a challenge for us as an aggregator.

We set ourselves the goal of indexing some popular governor contracts and surfacing the data in a way that is useful to users. We have made some progress on this front and now support the following:

• Optimism Token House, Optimism

• Nouns, Ethereum

• Uniswap, Ethereum

• Purple, Base

On-chain comments

Our product is more than just receiving push notifications. We want to really streamline how information is disseminated and surface community participations so people people are more informed.

As an experiment, we wanted to surface the feedback people made an effort to write when voting. The results were extremely heartwarming. We found ourselves looking at peoples reasoning behind proposals more closely, and it was really easy to distinguish low/high quality contributions.

For those who are more data inclined here is the raw data at the time of writing.

Project    Total Votes    Votes with comment
Uniswap    50633          491
Purple     265            56
Nouns      15586          6669
Optimism   137776         1807

In additional to surfacing historical data we also deliver push notifications when members vote on chain with a reason. When observed during a live vote, it just felt good.

https://warpcast.com/1a35e1/0x1301485f

This has lead us to double down on social and extend this functionality to Snapshot spaces. Next up we will be cooking up how we add Farcaster into the mix.

Download the latest version of the app which will always be at https://lighthouse.cx

Acknowledgements

We thank our early supporters and people who have given us their time and feedback.

In particular:

• /daos — A farcaster channel where people who share a similar passion for advancing DAO technology talk weekly.

• Metagov — A laboratory for digital governance

• Hats Protocol — Making fundamental leaps forward in how we organise online.

fin.

If you would like to have your on-chain community supported on Lighthouse, please email us at hello@lighthouse.cx or better tag us on Farcaster using /lighthouse0x or @1a35e1 and we shall be in touch.

We use the word "community" to describe a group of people who share similar interests, and who are connected via ownership of one or more tokens (DAO governance tokens, NTFs, or even community-based meme tokens).

As on-chain ecosystems develop, new primitives are emerging which change how these groups coordinate. Tokens are no longer limited to representing ownership, they can also enable their holders to perform actions in a privacy-preserving manner.

Web2 gave us the "Like" and "Share". Web3 has given us "Vote", "Mint", "Collect", "Tip" (so far) We are only beginning to scratch the surface of what is possible.

Having participated in various communities, we have experienced firsthand the challenges on-chain communities face. Being able to ensure that the information transmitted reaches it's intended recipient, has not been tampered with, and originates from the person/people claiming to be the author is one of the biggest issues facing these core participants of these groups.

This stems from channel fragmentation and poor personal security protocols, the largest risks of which include:

• Phishing links

  • Users impersonating fake accounts on Twitter/Discord/Telegram

  • Compromised accounts due to poor password management

• False information / Misuse of Community Power

  • Leadership conflicts bleeding into the community creating unsafe spaces

  • False information posted to large communities resulting in loss of digital assets

• Compromised anonymity/pseudo-anonymity

  • Joining collaboration sessions using Web2 tooling that requires the divulging of email addresses, phone numbers, or other Personal Identifiable Information (PII)

• Accountability

  • Fraudulent projects setup accounts, raise money, make promises, and then delete records of past communications with the community

With the acceleration of AI and deepfake technology, malicious actors preying on both novices and advanced users will only increase. Thus, the ability to verify that the information you are consuming is displayed as intended and agreed upon by the rules of the community becomes essential for establishing greater trust and making collaborative decisions by the community.

Our answer to these problems is Lighthouse. Our platform empowers community leaders to effectively engage with their members, in a verifiable and trustless way, and deliver actionable content to those who've opted in.

We started as a protocol, and even open sourced a PoC at ETHGlobal Lisbon 2023. However, in talking to everyday users since then, we soon came to the realisation that most people who want to get started are still extremely scared of performing on-chain actions. This led us to the decision to launch a product which can slowly chip away at that fear, and show people that creating and managing a Web3 native community doesn't need to be intimidating.

Unlike traditional consumer social apps focused on transactional Web3 events, Lighthouse serves as a dedicated space for community-centric actions. Our native mobile app presents a streamlined view to minimise voter fatigue [3] allowing for focused participation and serving as an easier entry point to on-chain participation.

For community leaders, Lighthouse makes it simple to configure the who and how of participation in your community.

• Should announcements be written to the blockchain so you can build trust with your holders?

• Should proposal discussions be public, or limited to token holders only? Or perhaps only open to people who have held their tokens for a certain number of days?

• How do you identify who actively participates and reward them?

• We even solve logistical challenges; perhaps there is a Town Hall scheduled and you need to remind your holders you are about to go live in 5 minutes!

So how does this differ from other consumer-facing social apps? Where other Web3 Native social apps do a great job focusing on transactional events of Web3, Lighthouse aims to be a hub where you can focus on the actions you care about in specific communities. Think of it as your Discord or Telegram announcements channel, but with additional powers.

We deliver this in an easy to consume format that does not force users to sign up to a mailing list or remember to check for updates on whatever platform the community organizers have picked.

Our goal is to gently introduce new users to the web3 way of thinking, while still allowing power users the ability to verify and unpack the more complicated aspects of web3 interactions

By enabling more communication participation and discussion, we hope to foster stronger communities who are better informed, thus creating a positive feedback loop for even more innovation. As a completely bootstrapped project, we are excited and proud to share with you a glimpse of what the future could be and to begin our journey. We plan to work deeply across the ecosystem making composability and interoperability one of the founding principles of our product.

The platform is live and available to explore at lighthouse.cx. Please check it out, and we look forward to hearing from you!

[1] https://deepdao.io/organizations

[2] https://decrypt.co/118438/2022-versus-2021-nft-sales

[3] https://www3.weforum.org/docs/WEF_Decentralized_Autonomous_Organization_Toolkit_2023.pdf