This proposal was prepared in collaboration with @Tjark – thank you very much for all your feedback and input.
Summary
Otterspace Badges provide DAOs with a new, non-financial coordination primitive to enable richer interactions and a more nuanced model of participation.
We are live with our private Beta on Optimism and are already used by Bankless DAO, Radicle DAO, Krause House, Cabin DAO, Token Engineering Academy, Cow DAO, Logos DAO, and many others.
Have 3 mins? Here’s a short Tweet explaining the product (including product screenshots): https://twitter.com/otterspace_xyz/status/1580517702581395456
What is Otterspace and what does it help with?
Otterspace is building a flexible and easy-to-use interface for DAOs to use non-transferable NFTs, which we call Badges. Badges can enable DAOs to perform non-financialized governance (with Snapshot), automate access rights & permissions (with Guild & Collab.Land), manage community-specific reputation/credentials, and create better incentive systems. Badges can be easily designed and issued to members via our App interface. Through our API endpoint, members can also be automatically added to an allowlist programmatically. The protocol supports badge revocation, expiry and reinstatement, so the community is able to respond to bad actors.
We are co-authoring a token standard specifically for non-transferable tokens (EIP 4973) on top of which we are building an open protocol. Our interface allows DAOs to use the protocol quickly without writing code, while the api and protocol enable custom implementations for DAOs with specific requirements.
You can use Otterspace to:
- Create non-transferable Badges
- Set Badge expiry
- Issue claimable vouchers to members
- Revoke Badges
- Use Badges in Snapshot governance
- Use Badges for token-gating with Guild.xyz and Collab.Land
The product
Use Otterspace to create non-transferable Badges for your teams out of an EOA or Safe multi-sig.
Set an optional expiration date to allow the season member Badge to expire at the end of the quarter.
Add members to the Badge mint list so they can mint with consent. Otterspace Badges cannot be non-consensually airdropped.
The community can revoke (deactivate) Badges, so a member can no longer vote on Snapshot or access resources once their tenure has ended or if they have abused their role.
View the community’s Badge collection on the community page.
Use Badges for governance on Snapshot, either standalone or alongside an ERC20 or other token. Sybil-resistant (through human attestation), non-financial governance.
Badge-gate your Discord or Telegram channels with Guild. Make Badges the source of truth for your DAO roles & structure.
Use Cases for PoolTogether
Problem statement:
- Lack of structure around the organizational framework paired with lack of autonomy for individual teams.
Solution:
PoolTogether can use Badges as a means of
- Distributing influence and responsibility based on roles and reputation
- Addressing plutocracy
- Distinguish between and curate different teams in the DAO
- Use social recognition as an incentive
Use cases
#1 Distributing Influence
Badges can be distributed and held by members of PoolTogether based on their role and participation, which may hold additional governance rights and access permissions. By doing so, the DAO can distribute influence among participants in a more nuanced way by allocating $POOL held by the treasury and delegating that to Badge holders (this step would go beyond the pilot phase; the groundwork for the delegation will be laid in Phase 1-3 as outlined below). With this distribution, both coin holders and badge holders can participate in the same governance process. Badges can be used to grant a “boost” in governance power to stakeholders with low token allocations, for example.
#2 Governance across sub-groups
Voting with Badges is one way to coordinate and reach consensus across stakeholder groups. For example, sub-spaces can be set up within Snapshot for various teams or stakeholder groups. These spaces can be configured such that only holders of a specific Badge can participate in proposals. This is a further way to decentralize and distribute the influence over specific types of decisions. Badges can also be a means of measuring reputation within various guilds, which could be used to further delegate governing power in a more dynamic fashion.
#3 Permissions
Badges can also be used to manage access permissions, for example by automatically granting Discord roles to holders of a badge. The Otterspace team is also investing in integrations with decentralized project management and knowledge management tools including Clarity, Charmverse, Discourse, Wonder, and DeWork.
Thanks goes to @Tjark, who helped flesh out concrete use cases in this section!
Execution plan
Set up an initial pilot use case to test how Badges could work in practice. Before success of the implementation can be proven, the Otterspace team suggests running a testing implementation on Optimism to save transaction costs. Otterspace will cover the minting costs on Optimism by airdropping ETH on Optimism to the relevant team for further distribution. After successful implementation has been proven in Phase 2, the implementation will move to Mainnet for Phase 3.
Pilot Phase 1 – Participate in an onboarding workshop (1 week)
- The relevant Pool Together team will participate in a cohort-based workshop where we walk you through the process of implementing badges in your DAO. This includes org design & contributor mapping, badge architecture and badge design. Badge architecture also includes considerations of deciding how much influence (voting power) a Badge should hold and which teams would receive additional influence.
Pilot Phase 2 – Create Badges for sub-orgs (1 week)
- After completing the workshop, the relevant team distributes Badges to relevant members and contributors.
Pilot Phase 3 – Use Badges for distribution of influence (2 weeks)
- After Badges have been distributed, downstream integrations will be set up and Badges will be used within gating and governance tooling.
Measures of Success
Phase 1:
- Come up with a concrete step plan on how to distribute influence, including the weights for each respective team
Phase 2:
- All team members that were added to the allowlist successfully minted their badge
- PTIP to allocate $POOL for delegation to Badges
Phase 3:
- Permissions management for teams is fully automated in at least 2 downstream integrations (i.e. Guild & Snapshot)
Important links
-
Developer docs (all contracts are open sourced): https://docs.otterspace.xyz/developer-docs
-
Website: https://otterspace.xyz/
-
Twitter: https://twitter.com/otterspace_xyz