The Otters go Soulbound

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

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

If DAO members could accrue reputation and receive recognition, there would be stronger incentives to maintain long-standing and positive relationships with the communities they are part of. Reputation or social standing are not themselves part of the badge, but are inferred by the viewer from seeing the badges collected by a person.

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

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.

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

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.

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