We love
@hatsprotocol and will continue to build upon it going forward as it has become integral for our internal roles management and with
@greengoodsapp making a simple yet powerful role and access system onchain.
Thanks for building the foundation we stand on.
Hats Protocol grew out of the wild, hopeful DAO experiments of 2020 and 2021. I was lucky to be in the thick of that scene. It was beautiful, but we kept hitting the same wall: in organizations where everyone was responsible for everything, no one really was. Three and a half years ago we set out to fix that, to build the infrastructure a world of onchain organizations would need.
Today, we're winding that effort down. I'm deeply proud of what we built and the hard problems we actually solved, and more grateful than I can say to the team, the stewards, and the community who showed up for it.
I won't pretend I'm not frustrated. The DAO space mostly drifted sideways and then down, and too much of that was self-inflicted. People fronted a community-first ethos and walked away the moment decentralization got inconvenient. There was a surprising misunderstanding of what DAOs could be, which constrained imagination and innovation until open-ended experimentation hardened into rigid templates (the wrong ones, if you ask me) and it got harder and harder to try something genuinely new. As the hype faded, capital and attention drained out of the space, and with them the patience to keep experimenting.
None of this has changed my mind. How we structure authority, responsibility, and accountability is the foundation on which organizations and institutions are built. As AI proliferates and old assumptions break down, we'll need new, AI-native organizations and new, AI-native institutions. We'll need to construct the trust environments in which AI agents operate, the structures, constraints, and incentives that let humans and AI agents rely on one another. That's exactly what a role-based approach like Hats makes possible.
Haberdasher Labs is winding down, but Hats Protocol itself isn't going anywhere. the beautiful thing about Ethereum is that the smart contract protocol will always be here: immutable, open, and genuinely great to build on. For example, earlier this year I won a hackathon with a project built on top of Hats, and multiple people continue to build on the infra.
Long live Hats Protocol 🧢