Hey PushDAO, David here from Hats Protocol, I’m one of the cofounders and the ecosystem lead hat-wearer. Was great to join your community on a community call a couple weeks ago on June 20.
Wanted to follow up here with more information on Hats and some thoughts about how PushDAO could start using Hats to serve its council development and progressive decentralization efforts, particularly given how PushDAO is now adding support that will enable hat-gated Push Chats!
Happy to answer any questions and support this implementation if you feel it would be valuable. Look forward to hearing your thoughts.
Hats Overview
Hats is the open-source onchain roles protocol used by top DAOs including EigenDAO, RareDAO and TreasureDAO to create digital power structures and manage permissions across the open internet.
Diving deeper, Hats Protocol is a platform for programmatically creating and managing DAO contributor roles, responsibilities, and permissions. Hats empowers decentralized organizations to get things done by making sure people, teams, and code have everything they need to do their best work, while holding them accountable via onchain role revocation mechanisms. A single hat—a specialized ERC1155 token generated by Hats Protocol—provides a way of digitizing power, giving its wearers the access, authorities, and permissions they need to fulfill a given role.
RareDAO’s Hats tree, shared here as an example. See the case study here.
Hats for PushDAO
We see an opportunity for Hats to serve PushDAO’s progressive decentralization, beginning with the PushDAO Council and any other councils, committees, or roles that may arise.
In particular:
Implementing Hats will increase transparency and legitimacy of PushDAO’s councils and roles by providing the roles with an onchain source of truth. Anyone will be able to see who is holding the role at a given time, along with the responsibilities, authorities, and eligibility criteria of the role.
Hats provide the real delegation of authorities and permissions, both onchain and offchain. Those role holders (or “hat wearers”, as we call them) can access their relevant permissions (including Discord or Charmverse roles, Safe multisig singing authority, Farcaster casting rights, and [new!] Push Chats! plus a lot more) directly from their hat. This makes it easy to track and manage contributor permissions, tie permissions to specific accountability criteria (see below), save time and reduce human error through automation, and ensure only the right agents have the right permissions at the right time.
You can introduce specific eligibility criteria for council members or role holders, to increase accountability. If at any time any role-holders become ineligible for a role based on your desired eligibility criteria (e.g., they do not maintain a certain token balance; they do not stake tokens above a certain threshold, etc. – see more eligibility criteria examples here), they will immediately and automatically lose their hat along with any associated permissions. This saves time and increases accountability.
When councils and specific roles (e.g., Farcaster caster) shift to elections to increase decentralization, Hats can be automatically granted to election winners via Snapshot, JokeRace, Tally, or almost any other election system you prefer to use. This means that PushDAO can delegate permissions to election winners (and only to election winners) without requiring that the community trust a group of executors (often multisig signers) to accurately implement the results of the election. This increases decentralization and reduces potential capture vectors.
Hats — and their associated permissions — can be automatically deactivated at the end of a given election term. When a Council member reaches the end of their term, their hats will be automatically toggled off and they will immediately lose any associated permissions that are connected onchain or by token-gate. At this time, a new election can be automatically triggered.
Providing Structure for PushDAO as it Progressively Decentralizes
Hats can help provide a credible pathway to decentralization for PushDAO councils and committees, while also providing PushDAO with a way to encode its roles, agents, permissions, and accountabilities into a programmable graph. Together, this will serve to increase the legitimacy of PushDAO governance as it continues on its journey of progressive decentralization.
In its final state, control over the Council roles and its membership can be fully decentralized and onchain with Hats. Council Members may be elected directly by the DAO and granted all powers associated with the role for a specified term without the need for a trusted group of executors to accurately implement the results of the election. Council Members may also be held accountable to specified criteria (such as maintaining a certain threshold of token holdings, staking requirements, or behaving in accordance with a signed agreement) automatically and without the need for centralized oversight.
Below I’ve created an example Hats tree for PushDAO – no doubt this is inaccurate, but sharing here to serve as an illustrative example of what an initial PushDAO Hats tree might look like.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts and supporting the evolution of PushDAO!
Hats Protocol Links
- Website: https://hatsprotocol.xyz
- Open-source Repo: https://github.com/hats-protocol/hats-protocol
- Hats App: https://app.hatsprotocol.xyz
- Documentation: https://docs.hatsprotocol.xyz
- Contact info: david@hatsprotocol.xyz, Telegram @davehrlichman