Organizations work better with Hats. Save time, automate onboarding, and manage permissions across the internet with programmable onchain roles.
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As DAOs scale, they often face challenges in securely managing signing authority over their Safe multisigs. This becomes particularly pronounced during role transitions, when the potential for operational delays and governance risks increase substantially.
Hats enables organizations like Purple, Questbook, and TreasureDAO to securely grant control of funds and contracts to specific individuals, committees, and councils, while retaining the ability to revoke or transfer that authority as needed.
Featured Organization: Purple. See their Hats structure here.
A critical mechanism in Purple’s governance is the Security Council, designed to protect the DAO from governance attacks. The elected Security Council members automatically receive signing authority on the Security Council multisig via their Hats. This multisig has veto power over DAO proposals, enabling the Security Council to reject any proposals that pose a threat to the DAO’s integrity.
By bringing the Security Council role onchain, Purple, whose goal is to proliferate and expand the Farcaster protocol and ecosystem, ensures that veto power is only granted to those elected by the community, maintaining transparency and accountability. This setup allows for seamless transitions of signing authority, reducing the risk of governance attacks during periods of change.
The Security Council's implementation can serve as a blueprint for other DAOs, showcasing a replicable model to enhance security and governance resilience. This approach ensures that power is linked to roles, not individuals, enabling efficient and secure management of the DAO’s operations.
Featured organization: Questbook. See their Hats structure here.
Questbook has granted designated Grants Allocators the ability to distribute grants allocated to them by the Arbitrum ecosystem across four domains. Questbook uses Hats to retain ultimate control over those Safes and ensure that Safes remain secure even if Grants Allocators were to lose their private keys.
Quesbook was also interested in requiring the Program Manager to sign off on grants allocations across each of the four domains. Using Hats, the Questbook Program Manager role holds signing authority on 2/2 multisigs for each of the four domains. If the Program Manager were to lose access to their wallet, their hat — and the signing authority that goes along with it — could be transferred to another program manager by Questbook.
Meanwhile, the four Grants Allocators are granted with signing authority on each of their respective 2/2 multisigs via their hats. These Grants Allocator roles can then become elected positions in the future, using Hats election eligibility, to ensure that domain allocators are always trusted by and held accountable to the DAO.
Featured organization: TreasureDAO. See their Hats structure here.
Voting in a large DAO takes a lot of time. The key to saving time and reducing costs associated with governance is through smart delegation. TreasureDAO, a top delegate in the Arbitrum ecosystem, has significantly reduced its governance costs by forming a council with the power to represent TreasureDAO in Arbitrum governance. Arbitrum Council (ARC) members, called ARC Liaisons, are now able to vote with the delegated $ARB in a safe and secure way, both via onchain votes in the Arbitrum Governor (via Tally) and offchain signaling in Arbitrum’s Snapshot space.
