Interoperable Governance: Brands and Communities

Ethereum is a mesh of communities coalescing around common values such as node runners coming together for client diversity, DeFi offering yield, purpose-driven DAOs, etc. A brand in the Stakehouse protocol is commonly referred to as a staking collective, and is able to have its own community rule for social coordination within the house. This brings harmony and purpose to its advancement and continuous growth. The brand enables a value-based gated community token tooling for Stakehouse users to grow together with representation.

KNOTs have dual representation in the protocol, firstly being associated with a house and then with a brand. When a house is created, it creates its own brand identified by a three to five letter ticker- eg: STAKE. For users adding a KNOT to a house, they have the option to either create their own brand for themselves and organize around that brand ticker, or join any of the existing brands. Brands are not house exclusive, so KNOTs from many houses can coexist under a brand as a shared collective portfolio.

When a new brand is created, the creator receives an NFT with its ticker and the ID of the founding KNOT. This NFT represents ownership of the brand, and also allows the owner to customize the brand description and image URI.

The automated collective collaboration model of Stakehouse brands can act as a sybil resistance DeSoc governance mechanism for a single or nested community with shared ideals. It's more of a Schelling point of stakers activities that echo and amplify their voices at various levels for societal significance. A user can switch their associated brand at any time, however, their history of brand participation is preserved in the registry and serves as a tamper-proof composable credential for on-chain reputation. Intuitively, provenance and gatekeeping enable on-chain Know-Your-Community features. This allows a house to bring hygiene on who they accept to the house/brand. Institutions can therefore ensure the highest levels of compliance across the board.

Generally, brands will encode relationships by exposing connected KNOTs with strongly held social commitments, credentials, and affiliations of stakers on-chain. The social encoding allows collaborative communities to come together bottom up, as emergent properties of each other to cocreate plural network goods and intelligences. This can be done at a range of scales.

Brands and associated KNOT tokens are managed by the plug-and-play Community Central registry contract. The registry can additionally pave the way for extended rights and governance mechanisms that reward trust and cooperation, while protecting networks from capture, extraction, and domination through programmable incentives for an extended multichain DAO ecosystem.