The Otters go Soulbound

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 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

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

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

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

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.