Background

The "ownership economy" is becoming popular in crypto. The essential property of ownership economy projects is that they distribute ownership to their users (often in addition to their workers and investors).

This model is becoming popular because:

1. Giving out ownership to users is a powerful bootstrap mechanism.
2. Legally decentralizing the project provides a better way for stakeholders to capitalize on their stake (i.e. make money from their tokens).
3. Decentralizing ownership creates better long-term alignment, with the promise that these organizations will be less exploitive of their users and workers than investor-owned companies.

Mature ownership economy companies have a three-part structure:

• Product: the good or service provided.
• Token Economy: at least one associated cryptocurrency token and mechanisms to distribute that token to users, workers, and investors.
• Governance Platform: a decision-making system that puts the token holders in charge of the product and the token economy, letting token holders decide how to do further product development, distribute revenue, adjust token economics, etc.

The governance system for an ownership economy project today must provide:

• Usability — participation should be easy and inexpensive
• Flexibility —
  • Governance can take the variety of actions needed to control the token economics and product
  • Governance can be controlled by the variety of tokens distributed as part of the token economy (e.g. tokens staked in a DeFi protocol)
  • Governance interface can be customized and embedded in new interfaces with little extra work

Problem

Existing governance platforms are not providing usability and flexibility. They all suffer from one or more of these issues:

• Usability problems
• Flexibility problems