Why I think optimistic governance and AI agents will be the future of decentralized prop firms It is already obvious that real-world stocks, indices, and commodity futures are coming onchain, and that perpetual futures are making them a 24/7 activity. Platforms like @HyperliquidX, @PhoenixTrade, @perpltrade, @Lighter_xyz and @Aster_DEX are already redefining what onchain perps should look like. The question is how everyday DeFi users can tap into this opportunity. There are two groups. Traders need capital. Retail and sophisticated investors want yield. Traders need the flexibility to execute within the risk parameters they are given. Investors need the assurance that they can stop a trader from wrecking the treasury. In real-world prop firms, traders get accounts that the firm controls and manages. Giving a trader a wallet with funds is different: it is like handing the money over, which is risky. Optimistic governance solves this. Think of a treasury with multiple owners and a few managers who execute transactions regularly, without interference. Those transactions are challenged only if they break the rules or are disputed. That model looks like a workable structure for prop firms. The trader trades continuously, opening and closing positions from the treasury. If an investor thinks a trade is bad, they can dispute it. If a trade breaks the risk rules, such as the daily trade amount, the daily position size, or the allowed leverage, an AI agent automatically disputes it and notifies all investors, who can then take action, such as voting it down. The contract itself is an account interacting with the perp DEX, so every position opened or closed is visible to everyone. There is one caveat. This cannot be built on public platforms, because it would expose confidential information about both the traders and the investors. At @replicolabs, we are building this infrastructure on top of @proteandaos, our messenger governance layer. It lets traders raise capital for perpetual trading and lets investors earn from trading talent by backing a strategy with capital. With Protean: ✅Private messenger groups provide confidentiality. ✅Our governance system gives traders freedom and protects the treasury. ✅Our agents provide automatic safeguards such as stop-losses, take-profits, and the risk checks above. We are not just building a tool. We are building the whole package. Faster...

We just want DAO magic to go global. 🪄 Big shout-out to the guys at @3rdvariation and @SuperteamNG for this interview. faster...

So we just finished designing and developing DAO Vortexes: the SVM implementation of DAO Spaces. We're taking this library slowly because of the complexity that comes with Solana development. Anyways... It's been fun, and we learned a lot, especially that SVM program development is a bit stricter than its EVM counterpart. We couldn't make governance switchable without some kind of shared state, so Vortexes is built a bit differently from the Spaces contracts. It's a combination of two parts: Governance programs, which handle the decision logic (proposals, votes, signers) and token vaulting (staking). They hold no DAO funds. The Vortex Hub, a shared program that keeps every DAO's record, including which governance program it currently listens to, and holds and controls each DAO's treasury. When a proposal is ready to run, the execute call goes to the hub, not to the governance program. The hub asks the DAO's current governance program for a receipt on that proposal. Only if the governance program confirms that it passed and can run now does the hub have the treasury execute the proposal's actions. If a proposal is made to change the DAO's governance, its instructions ask the hub, not the old governance program, to move its pointer from the current governance program to the new one. That only takes effect after a two-day waiting period, and only once the DAO has been set up in the new program. From then on, the hub listens only to the new governance program when it comes to the treasury and the assets the DAO owns, so the only way to vote is through the governance program the hub points to. Proposals left over from the old governance can never run again. Access the repo below 👇

The @proteandaos pages are now live. What are they? Messenger WebView pages that let proposers add long descriptions to their proposal, and since they are native to the platforms, users can easily view them and return to the chat. They also let users watch live governance metrics for that proposal... Thank you for your attention.

BTW, I'm at @SuperteamNG Startup Village 3.0. It has been fun so far, especially having a conversation with @NzubeEzudo about product distribution and product framing. I was also excited to see people like @energy_0x, @psoliteSol, @alexfavour, and others. Hoping to chill out more with all of you guys. faster...

We have said this since 2024... In the future, the whole process of proposing, voting, and execution will be handled by agents onchain and offchain... Our next phase of @proteandaos will prove that algorithmic governance is the way to go.

We just finished testing our private opportunity markets on Telegram using @proteandaos. Key takeaway: @zama is an awesome privacy tool for EVMs, I personally was relieved to know that all our privacy parameters flowed perfectly into it encrypted system. I am super excited to test other decision markets with Protean. Below is our current analytics layout, a bit sketchy, but we would improve it with graphs and charts in the coming weeks.

The biggest issues DAOs face are voter apathy, treasury and governance modularity, and on-chain direct transaction execution. Sending community members to external forums to discuss a proposal fragments participation—most people won't leave the platform they're already on, since not everyone is a developer. Then forwarding them to a separate platform to make proposals is another level of friction (connect wallet, monitor for active proposals, and the like). Governance should be decoupled from the treasury. Governance can change; the treasury should never have to migrate. Rigid systems lead to risky migrations, governance gaming, and whale manipulation. Treasuries are meant to be vaults controlled by the DAO itself, not by a Safe multisig—that introduces another single point of failure into the system. The slightest OpSec mistake and the treasury is gone. The solutions are simple: Keep governance discussions in Discord, Slack, and Telegram. Telegram already has a setting to structure a group like a server. What's needed on top of that is a forum- or proposal-write-up site, where people can look up the details of a proposal. Governance should happen in the group chat, server, or workspace; we have OAuth<>embedded wallet systems, and bots/apps in these messengers can help with the interfacing. There should be dozens of governance models that a DAO can attach to, or detach from, its treasury. Governance should be evolutionary, not static. DAOs need a standard transaction library, where they can see and use actions that are verified—instead of accepting arbitrary, unverified bytecode from god knows where. If a DAO needs added security, a guard wrapper can be implemented, one where signers can only sign or reject a proposal and never create one. The ability to create a proposal as a security signer makes you an OpSec point of failure. All of these solutions are currently implemented in our Governance Library and Social Layer interface, @proteandaos. Thanks for your attention.

Why do I think Sowellian Governance is an awesome way of betting for DAO corporations? Unlike the popular opinion that futarchy is the best, I have a contrary opinion. Yes! Everyone is talking about futarchy, but there's one point in the system I think I should expose. Futarchy doesn't have a negation game; there's no measurement of whether the proposal was successful at the end, and there is no punishment for the people who voted for it. At the end, the DAO treasury or resources bear all the brunt of a failed execution. While I understand why this can be nice for normal DAOs, I certainly don't think it's ideal for DAO corporations because these organizations are not non-profits; they are there for profit. Someone has to be accountable: the proposer and the people who voted for it. Sowellian simply solves this problem. After a proposal is made, the token holders or a council votes on established criteria. Once those criteria are agreed upon, the proposal goes into voting. After it passes, it goes into execution, and after execution comes resolution. If the proposal that was executed meets the criteria for success, people who voted against it forfeit the stakes they made on the proposal. If the proposal fails, the people who voted for it forfeit their stake. The aim is that a failed execution costs the people who didn't support it money, while a successful execution rewards those who supported the proposal. Sowellian is about action and consequences. This is not far from how CEOs and executives behave with boards of directors: certain actions may require them to put their own interests or compensation at risk, and if things go right, they can receive additional shares through stock options, performance packages, and other incentives. Thank you for your attention.

Why do I think a Decentralized Unincorporated Nonprofit Association (DUNA) could be a better way to create a regionless DAO or community organization? One of the biggest problems with online communities is the gap between digital coordination and legal access. A community can coordinate globally through Discord, Telegram, Slack, or other platforms, but when it needs a bank account, sign contracts, hire people, or participate in legal proceedings, it usually has to create a traditional legal entity in a specific jurisdiction. Creating a Foundation, DAO LLC, or other legal wrapper can introduce significant formation, administrative, tax, and compliance requirements, which can be especially difficult for communities whose members are distributed across multiple countries. This is where Wyoming's DUNA framework becomes interesting. It was designed specifically for decentralized nonprofit associations and recognizes concepts such as smart contracts, governance proposals, distributed-ledger technology, and blockchain-based membership rights within the organization's governing principles. So what does this mean for a DAO? A DUNA can provide a legal entity through which a community can potentially: - Sign formal agreements and contracts. - Hire employees and service providers. - Hold assets and enter into business relationships. - Establish relationships with financial institutions and payment providers. - Operate as a legal organization while retaining community-driven governance. The important distinction is that DUNA doesn't make these things automatically available. Banks, payment providers, and other counterparties still have their own compliance requirements, and DUNAs have specific statutory requirements. But combine a DUNA with blockchain-based governance and something interesting emerges. Imagine a global association, social club, research community, or creator organization formed as a DUNA, with its governance and treasury coordinated through a bot on Discord, Telegram, or Slack. Members could elect administrators, govern the treasury, make proposals, and coordinate payments through the same interface where they already communicate. The DUNA provides the legal wrapper; blockchain provides programmable ownership and governance; and the messenger provides the everyday interface. In essence, the DAO doesn't have to choose between being a legally recognizable organization and being natively digital. And the funny part is that Wyoming has already been experimenting with this legal structure for years. The opportunity now is to build the infrastructure that makes it usable. Thank you for your attention.

Why do I think most opportunity markets today will fail? Most opportunity market builders assume that when a business, financial institution, club, or trading fund wants to conduct research or market consultation, it will broadcast the opportunity publicly. In reality, many won't. These consultations are often specialized forecasting exercises. Organizations may only want input from a specific group of professionals or a pre-selected list of eligible participants. Making the options public can also expose sensitive information to competitors. The organization may be considering several options, but the purpose of the market is to gather informed opinions before making its final decision—not to publicly reveal what it is considering. I think opportunity markets are still viable here. The missing piece is privacy. Organizations need to control who can participate, who can access the market, and potentially who can see the results and when they can see them. What better access layer is there than a gated Discord, Telegram, or Slack group with a native onchain opportunity market? The messenger already handles membership and access control. The onchain market handles the forecasting, incentives, and settlement. This creates a simple but powerful application of blockchain-based decision markets: private, permissioned forecasting for real-world organizations without requiring them to expose their decision-making process publicly. Thank you for your attention.

Why do most new multi-country clubs and associations always need to create a bank account in one region? Firstly, there is no available online and regionless way to create a multi-signatory account where the association can change signatories periodically (except for blockchain). This forces them to pick a single country to establish their account, which now makes it difficult to add new signatories, especially when those signatories are not from that country. Receiving foreign payments from members all over the world becomes an even bigger bottleneck. Most of these communities still hang out on places like Slack, Discord, Telegram, and even WhatsApp. That is where they communicate, deliberate, hold elections, and do everything else, but not manage their funds. It's painful that the internet wasn't built for payments, but with blockchain, bot abstraction, and stablecoins, these issues can be solved. Now imagine if there was a bot system that allows these people to make payments in their local currencies and then get converted to their preferred stablecoin — say USDT/USDC, JPYC, EURC, ZAR, cNGN, etc. — and deposited into an on-chain treasury governed by a delegated Governance DAO, where the signatories (the club or association executives) are elected for whatever tenure they choose. That sounds awesome, right? And all of this is done in such a way that payments to and from the treasury feel just like bank-account-to-bank-account payments. The group no longer needs to leave their community for anything, and interacting with the bot isn't even a complex process because almost everyone today has had some experience communicating with a bot or LLM. Thank you for your attention.