The rise of the internet has transformed the operational landscape of human organization, taking local socioeconomic communities and expanding their reach from a limited geographic jurisdiction to a global network of identities and interactions. Whether looking at centralized enterprise offerings or web3 "DAOs", the last two decades promised 'Digital Transformation' and accessible opportunity for all, yet these claims fall apart under closer examination of the landscape.
"Digital Transformation", for all it's glory, ended up being a centralization of software and compute into MEGACORP server farms. Organizations signing up for more streamlined management of their digital footprint were met with perpetually recurring costs, service fees, and loss of practical control over their operations. Data export costs, limited API access, and convoluted Terms of Service agreements have taken a promise of freedom from hassle and ensured that it means your business isn't your's.
As the rise of blockchains and cryptocurrencies in the mid 2010s looked at the problems with centralized control, or nation state contract enforcement in a digitally global world, ideas of onchain governance or alternative models of organizational design captured the interests of individuals and communities looking to escape the walled gardens of web2. DAOs became the primary way to countersignal or work around the legacy web, and have offered an effective shelling point for building communities that are looking for something more. Implementation details notwithstanding, though, most DAOs fail to demonstrate operational capacity to actually be the organizational model of the future.
In a 'traditional' DAO, there is some set of onchain smart contracts which control and enforce digital rights. Generally speaking these are either voting rights for the purposes of modifying the contracts, and the power to move financialized digital assets. This functionality has proven to be useful coordination technology, whether around incentive design for creating decentralized stablecoins, or just the lolz offered by ridiculous memecoins shilled on social media.
But even the most successful DAOs suffer a critical issue: practical operational control inevitably flows through a structure that is disjointed from the rights conferred onchain. Regardless of the form or function of a given DAO, they all suffer from off-chain centralization problems:
An NFT project doing its group chat in Discord and hosting its images on AWS
A 'DeFi' frontend being distributed via GitHub, hosted as a centralized webapp, and interacted with via an easily censored mobile app
A 'memecoin' building its community in a social app where human connection is intermediated by MEGACORP algorithms, as with X or TikTok
Any of these projects may have democratic ownership, decentralized governance, or distributed communities, but the connection between the onchain rights and the off-chain coordination layer and operational control is tenuous at best. This reality massively hinders the ability for novel organizational models to actually have a material impact on the world around us.
Syndicates aim to solve this problem.
Syndicates are portable digital organizations designed for 'network tribes' that value decentralization, personal sovereignty, and collective innovation. Critical to this purpose is the ability to make onchain activity map more accurately to off-chain operations.
Through a combination of onchain digital assets and tools, along with off-chain software running over a peer-to-peer and end-to-end encrypted network, Syndicates are able to operate as self-sovereign socioeconomic networks, both onchain and off-chain.
The onchain element of a Syndicate takes full advantage of the permissionless composability of open blockchains, integrating the Syndicate contract ecosystem with:
Urbit ID non-fungible tokens for identity and p2p networking
Tokenbound Account smart wallets for identity-linked transactions
Gnosis Safe multisigs and ENS domains for ecosystem compatibility
These technologies give us a way to manage onchain assets and governance, doing anything you may see from a web3 DAO:
Peer-to-peer token transfers
Pseudonymous asset ownership
Shared control of treasury assets
Trustless rights enforcement
The cornerstone, though, is how we create a link between the onchain and off-chain. If your onchain network is a collection of addresses, tokens, and cryptographic keys, your offchain network is a collection of actors coordinating across a blend of 'official' and unofficial digital and analog mediums looking to onchain digital artifacts as a representation of value and credibility. Unfortunately, in the current landscape, the state of off-chain networks is somewhere between 'tenuous' and 'entirely non-existent'.
This is important because the socioeconomic strength of any given web3 organization must be assessed with a mind to the validity of the connection between these two networks. If the onchain consensus doesn't have a valid connection to the off-chain operation (decentralized or otherwise), what good is the consensus as a indicator of operational capacity to impact the future on behalf of digital rights holders? Syndicates enhance the validity of this connection by inextricably linking your onchain shelling point to your off-chain shelling point.
Every Syndicate is built on top of an Urbit ID. More than just an onchain digital identity, the Urbit ID also controls a networked computer on Urbit's peer-to-peer network.
Not only is this networked computer capable of hosting censorship resistant websites and decentralized group chats, but it can even distribute software code peer-to-peer. Whether distributing Defi front ends, voting proposal interfaces, or even just community-specific app experiences, a Syndicate doesn't need to rely on a centralized server that presents a honeypot to hackers, a panopticon to advertisers, or a data mine for the AI borg. It can all be managed by the Syndicate's networked computer without requiring cost of onchain transaction execution, or making every piece of your operation public to anyone with a Chainalysis subscription and a grudge. Instead, it belongs to your community and abides by your values.
This networked computer is the off-chain schelling point for your Syndicate's community, and if governance control of the onchain asset changes so too does operational control of the off-chain computer.
Your Syndicate is a portable digital organization that treats its Urbit ID as a box for everything important––data, connections, software––so when you transfer control of the box, everything inside goes along for the ride. No wondering who controls the Twitter account. No worrying that you will need to doxx pseudonymous developers in order to settle some legal contract disputes in a nation state court. No hoping that you can figure out who has the power to push software updates to your web domain. Something belongs to the Syndicate? Give it to the Syndicate's urbit and call it good. Need to move the organization to a different jurisdiction? It's as simple as a file transfer. Need to effectuate a change of control of the management team of your operation? Completed with a crypto transaction.
Of course if a Syndicate is represented by a single Urbit ID, a singlular non-fungible digital asset, how do you build that into a networked community? It's a little bit difficult for a network to belong to everyone if there is only a single point of control.
Through Tokenbound accounts, a canonical Syndicate Registry, and an extensible plugin system of token deployment factories and programmatic minting contracts, the Syndicate contract ecosystem creates a 'finite tokenspace' that creates a 1:1 mapping between ERC20 "Syndicate Tokens" and Urbit IDs. This does two key things:
Allows fractionalization of an individual non-fungible token, enabling onchain signaling and participation in specific Syndicate communities
Protects against the proliferation of shitcoin scams, pump and dumps, or other wasteful spam
The onchain Syndicate Registry records relationships between Urbit IDs and Syndicate Token contract addresses, ensuring that community members and prospective token holders can transparently understand the connection between a given ERC20 token, an Urbit ID, and its off-chain networked computer. No need to rely on a centralized memecoin platform that centrally hosts off-chain content. No need to hope that you are following the right account on Twitter. No wishing that you didn't have to join yet another Telegram chat.
Interested in acquiring a particular Syndicate Token? Just send them a peer-to-peer message. Maybe they have a public group you can join, maybe they have some software you can download, or maybe they aren't even online (in which case, maybe you want to stay away). Worried the 'devs' will launch 65 more tokens just to rug you? With the 'finite tokenspace' limited to 65,535 urbit star and galaxy level tokens, they'd have to buy up a lot of urbit address space to do so, increasing the cost of throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.
What does a Syndicate Token do? Who knows. Maybe it's an internal reputation system for community members. Maybe it's a governance token that controls software updates or a protocol treasury. Maybe it's used to gate access to custom software or private group chats. That's up to the Syndicate itself. All we know is the token, the identity, and the networked computer give the Syndicate a unified presence across onchain and off-chain networks.
Regardless of what you might do with them, Syndicates are your way to unify your onchain digital rights with your off-chain digital coordination. So go forth and build something with your tribe.