We’re excited to share that Orca Protocol is rebranding to Metropolis and opening up pod beta access to a select group of DAOs.
DAOs as Cities
Many have likened DAOs to companies. But in their potential, DAOs are a lot more like cities.
Burgeoning hubs of economic and cultural activity, cities bring together people, cultures, and resources to cohabitate, connect, and depend on one another. These interdependent and interconnected networks create conditions for emergence, which allows cities to take on new properties that are greater than the sum of their parts.
This is the magic of cities.
DAOs have the same network potential, creating digital cities that optimize for human thriving and emergence. Organizations like FWB, Cabin, and others already understand the power of seeing their own ecosystems as cities ‒ local spaces for gathering, owned and governed by the citizens who cohabitate these spaces. This framing doesn’t just change how we design our spaces, it also changes what’s possible. By moving beyond company-centric mental models for DAOs, we open up the design space for building rich digital ecosystems that optimize for human thriving.
The Metropolis
If DAOs are cities, the entire DAO landscape can be likened to something of a megacity ‒ a Metropolis, if you will.
In a world where digital organizations seem to have no true bounds, Metropolis is the space that emerges ‒ the city of cities ‒ a rich landscape of interconnected and interdependent organizations. Much like a city, the richness of this Metropolis stems not from the glitzy buildings or beautiful people. Rather, it is the overlapping networks of people, culture, and economies that make these spaces thrive.
New Name, Same Vision
Our name is changing, but our product and vision remain the same – create human-centric building blocks for DAOs.
If we want DAOs to transform into digital cities, we need building blocks that allow these networks to become interconnected and interdependent. Pods are those building blocks.
Technically, pods are a Gnosis Safe multi-sig with a permissions layer for managing signers. In practice, this primitive adds a lot more functionality to Gnosis Safes than just permissioning, including:
- All your Safes in one interface Proposals across all your multi-sigs are aggregated into one interface ‒ making it easy for signers to quickly approve transactions.
- Manage signers with zero fuss With admin capabilities and NFTs for managing signers, mass onboarding and off-boarding contributors is simple.
- Give your Safe an identity No need to waste time and energy identifying multi-sig addresses. Every pod has a unique NFT, ENS name, and matching URL.
Beta Access
We can’t wait for DAOs to start podifying, which is why we airdropped a Built Permit NFT to a select group of organizations. This permit gives DAOs full access to Metropolis, which means multi-sig signers can podify an existing Safe or spin up new pods from scratch.
The best part? Podifying doesn’t even require DAO-wide consensus. Pods can be enabled per-Gnosis Safe, so each working group has the autonomy to decide whether they want to podify – no need for complicated governance or gathering consensus.
Check if you received a permit NFT here. We’ll be releasing new permits every week, so if you don’t yet have access – don’t worry, that will change soon.
Pods as Building Blocks
While pods are powerful on their own, like building blocks, the real magic comes when you click them together. As we continue to roll out pod access across the ecosystem, we’re also building tools so DAOs can fully leverage the interoperability of pods. With everything from pod templates to deploying the entire on-chain structure of your DAO in one click, we’ve got a lot more in store to help DAOs transform into interconnected and interdependent digital cities.
We can’t wait to see what you build. Ⓜ️
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To learn more about pods, visit our docs. Stay up to date on all things Metropolis by following us on Twitter at @0xMetropolis. Check if you have beta access to pods at pod.xyz.