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.

If DAO membership were represented by more specific units, decisions about the rights, permissions and powers of individual members could be differentiated.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Recognition and other non-financial benefits can be powerful rewards (and therefore incentives) for providing long-term value within a space.