The Otters go Soulbound

Our vision is to give DAOs the tools to better represent the varying nature of membership, improve member engagement, coordination and distribution of power and permission.

Reputation, quality of work, social capital and experience are already being used by DAOs to make decisions about how to treat specific members, but if these qualities could be inferred from an on-chain record, DAOs would become more autonomous and permissionless. Decisions could be made automatically, such as unlocking new spaces or granting great... See more

our hypothesis is that roles are not the right atomic membership units of Web3, and that membership should be emergent rather than designed and represented as a role. The Otter Protocol allows the nature of someone’s membership in a DAO to be inferred and emerge from the badges they hold, and for specific badges or combinations of badges to be used... See more

Currently, individual members of a DAO are only distinguished from one another by how many tokens they own. In most cases a boundary is drawn between owning zero tokens (not a member), owning some tokens (community member) and owning more than N tokens (full/voting member). Looking at the current on-chain representation of a DAO’s members, all we s... See more

badges enable the DAO to automatically push power to the edges without human intervention, realizing the promise of both decentralization and autonomy.

Otters want to show off who they are, not just collect rocks

Because of the limited token model on which they operate, DAOs are forced to rely on implicit and interpersonal mechanics. Human intervention is necessary because there is not enough trusted information captured on-chain about an individual in a DAO.

The limited representation of DAO membership is problematic because important decisions about DAO governance, equity and operations can only take single-dimension token ownership as input, or else rely on manual human assessment.

In the DAO space, Cabin has been exploring this concept with their Passports and Stamps, whereby members earn stamps to add to their collection and display in their passports.

The Otter Protocol does not directly tackle governance, but provides an additional primitive that governance frameworks can take into account. Governance power over specific domains could be distributed to holders of specific badges, or governance weight could increase based on ownership of a badge.