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MakerDAO built an automated system with Hats to increase save governance facilitators’ time and reduce operational delays associated with membership approval
MakerDAO sought to enhance their governance structure, aiming for a more resilient and transparent system to advance its Endgame Plan. Today they are experimenting with Hats, exploring how it can create a modular governance system defined by programmable rules.
“By working with a trusted partner like Hats, we were able to really lean on their expertise and build something that was more in line with what the future state of Maker needed.” - Retro, MakerDAO Ecosystem Facilitator serving Endgame
A core tenant of MakerDAO’s Endgame Plan is to reduce the reliance on Web 2.0 tools and enable a governance system with resiliency and accessibility. The concept of Aligned Voter Committees (AVCs) served as a specific role in governance for the DAO and required specialized infrastructure. Hats Protocol was identified as a solution for creating a modular governance system with programmable and rule-based, hyper resilient, and transparent data to ensure confidence and accountability within the system.
“We really wanted to focus on the vision of what we are trying to create with governance, something that is programmable and rule-based; something that's hyper resilient, but also transparent, so that there's confidence and accountability within the system. Hats seemed like a perfect use case for that.” - Retro, MakerDAO Governance Facilitator serving Endgame
MakerDAO collaborated with the Hats team to develop new governance tooling specifically designed to serve its needs and the needs of the AVC class. One such tool, called the MKR Verifier, uses a custom Hats eligibility module to verify MKR token ownership along with other requirements to determine eligibility for AVC roles represented as hats. As a result, the MKR Verifier provided a single source of truth for role verification, enabling a more autonomous and reliable governance process without central admin reliance.
This provided a pathway for an automated system that saved time for both MakerDAO governance facilitators and reduced operational delays associated with AVC membership approval. The experiment also unlocked the opportunity to identify more endgame primitives MakerDAO can look to bring onchain and easily operationalize with the Hats Protocol serving as infrastructure for the organization.
“Instead of a 24-48 hour delay of seeing AVC members be accepted, due to the logistics of different time zones and people having to go to the forum to manually accept things, we can create an automated system where those manual intervention points are more of oversight rather than an actual function that the system depends on." - Retro MakerDAO Governance Facilitator serving Endgame
The integration of Hats Protocol with MakerDAO's governance signifies a shift towards a more accountable and self-sustaining organizational model. Maker is exploring how it might utilize Hats in other areas of Maker governance, and plans to continue exploring how to capture the value MKR Verifier contract creates with custom UIs and dashboards, which will provide queryable information with timestamps, wallet addresses, and signatures. Research continues to identify and distill the complexity of the Endgame plan into primitives that are built into operations, enabling an accountable and resilient support system for their decentralized organization.
“Hats allowed MakerDAO to accomplish a primitive that has been a challenge for over a year. Now we're turning it into tooling that we hope will provide everyday impact and use throughout not just the AVC class but through the entire organization and ecosystem.” - Retro, MakerDAO Governance Facilitator serving Endgame