For the past few years I have been working on a new governance pattern, one that leaps away from the current proposal based paradigm. There’s reasons I came up with for sustaining this madmad effort, one of which being that voting on texts, onchain is not ideal. Sure, it kindof works, to about the same degree tokenized, legally settled “real world” assets will. We got here, in what I believe to be a local minimum, because we came up with it all from a position of necessity. Reasoning about governance without being overwhelmed by parliamentarisms does not come easy. Nor is the need for doing so that evident or pressing. Afterall parliaments, representative democracies, do work. If you’re happy with the politics they produce and therefore with an incremental approach to governance as politicians bundling texts for politicians to vote on, then there is little below for you.
I feel deeply to the contrary. Us defaulting to skeuomorphic, artificial, non-asynchronous paper era processes is a failure. Sure, our DAO parliaments are somewhat global and make use of cryptographic signatures. But their global state, disposition and historical record of becoming is hardly legible. It’s dense, hard work for anyone looking in, increasingly trending towards corporate dynamics brought in by corporate coded management expertise. So bad-bad and tedious that the stakeholders externalize their custodial duties and pay to pave a way through a mountain of apathy. I for one am not looking forward to the next change advisory board, not here for the resolution on the strategy to KPI the milestones. Not eager to forever reproduce the
mechanistic, Industrial Age, hierarchical, domination concepts of organization and the management practices they spawn. (Dee Hock, founder of Visa)
So, if not debating, interpreting and voting texts then what? Well, I argue that we do have something better and we have to look no further than what actually matters. And, in most organizations what matters most and is as such contentious is resource allocation. Budgets in the paper world, or simply: who gives how much to whom for what. By far of most concern to every member of an organization. And that, deliberately giving, in public, as signal, within a systematizing order, is sufficient for permissionless communal configuration.
The leap I am pushing for is understanding that coins are immensely powerful and the closest thing we have to a true DAO. If we really think about it, coins have always had the 3 required dogs in them even when instrumentalized for absolutist rule. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that Satoshi set out to make a peasant to peasant coin and he ended up surfacing for us all coordination and settlement substrates that places most of our understanding of organizations in offside. Coins are DAOs, they can serve any purpose, uniquely even no clear purpose at all.
Statements
Coins (as in fungible immutable moneys) are Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.
Organizations are membranes that move forward. What forward is is what governance is for.
Who gives how much for what to whom is of value and of interest to any part of an organization.
Therefore
Resource allocation is the primary governing behaviour.
Allocative, redistributive preferences are alone sufficient for governance.
The question then becomes, do we need to write and ratify proposals to allocate resources? I think not, but I would love to hear the case for it. My instinctive answer is that we had no real choice but to reproduce existing governance modes. So no, not really. The best way to understand what Optimism is, does, and more importantly wants to be is to look at how and for what it spends its OP token. That leaves room for far less ambiguity and virtuous posturing. So if arguably that gives a clearer picture of what it wills to be, why not just use the coin allocation directly as a way to crystalize direction? And here’s where the buzzword collection I chose for this post comes into play “native, realtime” governance - they imply dis-intermediation, a thing we know a few things about and a thing that coins do by means of being acted upon by its owners directly onchain, without necessitating the input of any one atomic party, using only the chain for sequencing, in a continuous strand of asynchronous instants. So, in more plain language, anyone holding the coin is an active stakeholder that can redistribute it such that the coin becomes better or worse off. That action is instant, and the aggregated, continuous totality of action produces direction and shared truth. The resulting state is objectively auditable by means of relative self-referencing quantities - something that bundling debates and sequencing them in bouts of legislative action can hardly provide.
Almost How It Works
First of all, it is highly experimental. Secondly, to my shame, there is no specification to refer you to. The fundamental way in which it is different: it is (by default) dis-incentivised governance. This is so for what I believe to be a very good reason: change always incurs cost. If you want to act on the body of an organization and change its direction, you should pay for it. This should not be controversial because this is what ultimately happens in all governance. What this accomplishes is dis-intermediation and a more direct coupling of legitimate interest to expenditure. That doesn’t mean that work or opposition can’t emerge and succeed within the order or you can’t, if you want, incentivise participation, but moreso that: (1) what is valuable and prioritized becomes co-created and certain to knowable degrees, and (2) governing incurs direct cost (work and/or token) and as such it incentivises purely speculative motivations outside the governance dynamics. It’s not that “governance attacks” or undeserved extraction become impossible, but rather that it forces governing agents to think and encode the specific conditions (membership qualifying conditions as well as cost) under which an “attack” is possible.
The protocol has nodes. Each node has a membrane: a set of conditions users have to fulfill to govern over it. Each node is derived from and nested under an ERC20. Nodes are nestable, they have names, they produce context, they embody specialization and locality and are the systematizing unit of the order. Each node has two tokens, a deposit one and a shares (of deposit) one. The shares are minted 1-to-1 by the deposit. The shares have a constant inflation rate governed over by node members. The inflation is what gets redistributed to node workers or children nodes. Burning shares across the entire nested node path redeems the root ERC20 token. Users can mint and burn their deposits along the path, can proportionally signal for changes in membrane conditions and inflation rate as well as influence the relative distribution of inflation to all its dependents as well as initiate, support and execute movements (external contract calls from nested execution engines).
“Concrete Properties Guaranteed to Users”
WillWe is a permissionless systematizing order that uses coin fungibility to facilitate and explain collective effort. Below, I go through some of the goals of Optimism’s governance and how its use could potentially advance them.
| Upgrade initiation | K-O | How are upgrades to OP Chains executed? | On majoritarian support an authorised node can execute onchain upgrade functionality. Upgrades can publicly compete for funding and mindshare. |
| Treasury Control | D | What is the control structure of the OP token treasury? | WillWe facilitates dynamic treasury management through fungible value allocations. Expenditure happens when felt as a need by the stakeholders/allocators. Control happens through transparent allocative signal as spending is not a one time event but continuous. Node shares inflation and available redeemable value can be actualized per second during each block. |
| Law of Chains | How does governance enforce the Law of Chains | Unsure. | |
| Chain Derivation | How is state of an OP Chain derived? | N/A | |
| State Verification | How can participants determine the state of the chain? | N/A | |
| Base Layer Neutrality | Does the core protocol enable anybody to transact? | N/A | |
| Economic Layer | |||
| Reward Allocations | G | How are rewards allocated across the Collective to sustain development and growth? | Rewards are allocated via public commitment, permissionlessly and instantly. “Rewards”, are directed based on anarchic and asynchronous valuation, calculated per second. |
| Budgeting | E | How are decisions about annual “budgets” made? | Eliminates the need for traditional budgeting. |
| Treasury Management | D | How are token and ETH treasuries managed? | There is no treasury per se. However, the foundation and any other such entities can choose to fund their own priorities as well as mirror existing allocative signals. Reducing an allocation is also signal. This would dis-ambiguate the wants and needs as well as the expected/assumed rate of progress via node burn velocity set through the inflation/disbursement rate. |
| Inflation and other parameters | B | How are parameter policies set? | Unsure. |
| Sequencer Revenue | D | How is Superchain revenue managed? | Unsure. |
| Social Layer | |||
| Token Supply | S | How much of total OP is in circulation? What is the minimum number of tokens that could unilaterally pass a proposal? | Context dependent. 50% + 1 for each node or member majority for some movements. (Contract calls.) |
| Identity/Citizenship | Q | How are participants in the Citizens’ House determined? | Belonging criteria is the domain of each context/node. Each node is sovereign and belonging conditions are as such localized in their own context. Global eligibility conditions can be used as such or in combination with any other arbitrary requirement. |
| Checks and Balances | L & R | How is voting power balanced in the Collective? | WillWe balances voting power with fungible token allocation and membrane changes. There is continuous voting. Plurality will determine balance. It will be decided each time by tokens, or by value expenditure patterns. The idea being that the power relations are more directly auditable; however, they do become everyone’s responsibility. In a sense this is susceptible to the bystander effect - the counter-balance to this being stakeholder interest and efficient market hypothesis as allocations should in theory be continously evaluated by the market. |
| Core Dev | K | Who are main contributors to the OP Stack? | Unsure. |
| Metagovernance | K & P | How are changes made to the rules and processes of the governance system itself? | Currently, the contracts are immutable. Being the case that it is allocative, there are no rules to be changed. Migration is possible yet it is unclear currently the extent to which they are needed. From the protocol perspective, new versions can be deployed as its own development is (to be) powered by the Will token. As such, the SuperERC20 token is the only truly immutable part of it - same logic is thought to apply to other chain deployments. |
| Proposal Rights | Who has the ability to create formal governance proposals? | Anyone and no one since this is not a proposal based system. To create a new node or movement (contract call) one needs to be a member in the parent/host node. Identity/citizenship conditions apply. | |
| Intent Setting | A & F | How are high-level Collective goals determined? | Real-time allocation and work. A new domain nested node for each project at earliest of stages. These are shelling points as well as clear signal aggregators. Other, more soft components can be added to aid sense-making. |
Politics of Transition
Now, to be honest, I have concerns about the willingness or capacity of “DAOs” for decentralization. Cleary, I am very unsatisfied by the current state of affairs. As such, I am a very reluctant citizen. I was promised a revolution (my first NFT was “Devs for Revolution”) and what I got instead is committees, commissions and plans of action. So I might be harsh, but, as the avantgarde of progressive decentralization is now in retreat, I find it a good moment as any to propose what could be an alternative. It’s not that the current paradigm produced nothing of value but moreso that its grasp on our collective imaginary is tragic.
From performative decentralization to instant, un-intermediated governance, there’s a distance. In that distance there are intermediaries. The intermediaries, of many kinds, might feel that any such approach will leave them disenfranchised. In part, rightly so. Direct, anarchic approaches to governance gave little apetite for representatives. Secondly, it is important to admit that delegates / politicians have their own interests. Those interests are important and do reflect themselves in a proclivity of siding with existing power concentrations. Delegates therefore position themselves strategically, balancing multiple interests, yet primarily pursuing their own (delegator perception, personal social capital, duty of custody, etc.). Not cutting them a slice from the pot of gold in the middle of the DAO is simultaneously politically untenable and arguably unfair.
Now I don’t want to sound self-defeating, but just to point out that there are a series of good reasons as to why any kind of shift to a more decentralized disposition likely takes away levers of power and potentially established income streams from some. There’s always political opposition from a position of power. Progressive decentralisation has always sounded to me like an unfortunate reiteration of the “All Power to the Soviets” slogan. It never happened. And likely it never will. People don’t have a good track record in giving up power. Unsurprisingly, every opposition or attempt at de-legitimizing existing (dominated) structures tends to be labeled as counter-revolutionary, or how we like to call it, “a governance attack”. Fortunately, the recent abandonment of progressive decentralization as a path for serious people created cracks for new approaches and understanding. We have to take it more seriously, if our interests allow.
Today and Tomorrow
As this gets hopefully read in the coffee houses of New York, the state of WillWe is the following. There is a protocol and proof of concept app live on Base. You can (try to) use it today. It could be better. The protocol code is not audited and it is almost entirely the work of one person. Now, if any of the above sparks joy, here are the asks: go use the app, do some transactions on base mainnet - who knows, maybe one day it will be eligible for RPGF. Go here, sign in, click join, click around if you feel like it. If you want to contribute, take a look at the repos: protocol and app. If you want to incentivise contributions, take a closer look at “the business model” and mint the SuperERC20 protocol token. The roadmap, to the extent there is any, is to dogfood its own future iterations. Simultaneously, my main concern is to secure a modicum of relevance for the ideas it embodies. I am fully aware of how much of an uphill battle it would be to try to outcompete the well funded proposal-industrial-complex.
One last cool thing I want to mention about un-intermediated, chain-sequenced governance is that it does not have to look like a forum. It can be a galaxy (or a procedurally generated city), rendered in the browser where, for example, each ERC20 is a star and all its subsequent nodes are planets with contributor endpoints as moons and external execution (proposals) as spaceships travelling from one planet to another celestial object. Distances can convey support. Orbit speed can signify burn rate. Planet size can communicate budget size. Population, membership count. So on, so forth. I don’t know about you but that would be not only cool but also a massive productivity upgrade given the intuitive summary of organizational life it can playfully convey.
I also wrote about it here.
DevNTell 30 min yap here.
WillWe is a systematizing order that attempts to radically change how we can work together to create powerful and sustainable economies governed by and for their contributors.
I hope it will accelerate chain sequenced governance and the prevalence of co-interested value.