An inverted power-structure DAO incorporates as an SCE

The beginnings

It is a time of exponential technological advancements but social innovation is not keeping pace. In the year of the old time-keeping of 2019 two travelers (Andreas and Jonas) participated in Blockchain Week in Berlin. They were “crypto pilled” for quite some time and were especially interested in opportunities of how Web3 could advance traditional organizations and enterprises to overcome the stickiness of the innovators’ dilemma and the huge comfort the status quo created for western organizations. In addition many westerners were pretty happy with themselves mainly being passive consumers (of technology) trying to excel their consumption but not their learning, impact and contribution.

It became obvious to the travelers that this Web3 community of like minded technology-driven innovators and change makers was much different than traditional corporate technology companies. What appeared was the advantages of Web3 culture/organization like agility, speed, composability, economic and technological innovation and “experimentation with skin in the game” could become a huge source of potential value creation for any traditional organization and society as a whole.

The two began a cadence of joint learning and networking and made first contributions to the Web3 space. The goal in the first place was just to experience this new way of thinking, contributing and the Web3 mindset. In parallel the conviction about the need for a practice of advising organizations about how to upgrade their business models with Web3 innovations while at the same time being deeply rooted in the Web3 space emerged. But it also proved valuable to expose Web3 projects to achievements of leading traditional organizations and catalyze their adoption with complex organizations. The idea of a “DAO to bridge Web3 and Enterprise” was born. It should manifest a sense of social rocket science and space travel as well as a notion of contributing more than taking, mainly by creating positive-sum games. So they called it “Rocketstar Foundation DAO”.

The founding crew is boarding

The crew was rapidly expanded by Paul and Elias being Rocketstars number two and three and additional Launchers Andreas, Torsten, Daniel and Rene. Where Rocketstars were representing the Web3-native mindset and Launchers were representing decade-long success in the enterprise software world. The crew represented all relevant core competencies the foundation believed were needed to allow for a holistic and responsible approach to Web3 business model innovation and adoption. Most notably these core competencies are enterprise software sales, strategy and technology consulting, solution design and architecture, large scale organizational change and innovation, data engineering and data science, business model innovation, platform design, token engineering and group facilitation.

On their journey the founders have met many other travelers, supportive and interested that inspired them. Will the team meet more travelers that are destined to be a member?

The crew has written a contract to govern their endeavors including their foundational values, the Rocketstar Foundations and a way of organizing any contribution that would be performed as part of the venture in Missions. Missions are projects of comparably small diverse teams that tackle very important challenges. The DAO is governed in a decentralized, hierarchy-less way and is covering strategic and foundational decisions. Missions are focussing on operational tasks and are allowing for hierarchy and any form of organization to optimize performance and output to allow for predictability.

In this way Rocketstar Foundation has an inverted power-structure compared to traditional organizations.

The emergence of Rocketstar SCE

Most traditional organizations follow a hierarchical leadership structure. They have relatively small boards of directors and only a few members in the c-level, who are taking strategic decisions and are deciding about the direction of the organization.

A DAO is hierarchy-less and every member has the same rights. Voting and decision making can be implemented in different ways, e.g. one-person-one-vote (Democracy), one-share-one-vote (Plutocracy) or something in between, like Quadratic Voting, where the voting weights are defined by the root of the shares. This discounts the voting power of large shareholders over-proportionally and increases the relative voting weight of smaller shareholders.

And typically every member of a DAO can suggest a proposal or challenge existing proposals. DAOs typcially run on blockchains and are a fundamental organizational building block of the Web3 stack. There is a lot of experimentation and research happening in the DAO space and the DAOs are interconnected by members that are participating in multiple DAOs. By that there is natural DAO composability happening, similar to overall technological composability of Web3. Unlike in traditional jobs where you typically only can be an employee of one company (one-person-one-job) in the DAO space it is common that somebody is a member of many DAOs (one-person-multiple-jobs).

DAO`s are omnipresent in the Web3 space, enabling communities (token holders) managing huge treasures and coordinating activities of their members across a shared purpose. Via DAO governance tokens web3 projects are enabled to be community-owned and -governed.

However DAOs are not from this world in a sense that they only exist in the Web3 world but are not a legal entity that can participate in real world economic activities. Therefore the founding crew engaged in an extensive evaluation of how the DAO can be incorporated in the most congruent way.

The crew came to the conclusion that many core-principles of their DAO can be incorporated as a Societas Cooperativa Europaea (SCE). Most notably the following characteristics of the SCE are favorable for their DAO principles:

Decentralized Ownership and Governance possible
The share register of the SCE can be on a public ledger
Joining and leaving the SCE can be self-governed
Minting and Burning of Shares is under full control of the SCE
The management and operational decision making of the SCE can be fully digital or digitally supported
The SCE is a limited liability corporation

The foundation of the SCE allows the DAO to reliably, securely and effectively engage with any legal entity while preserving all major DAO-principles the founding crew has defined.

The Universe of Rocketstar SCE

Web3 accelerates EU and EU accelerates Web3 — a symbiosis to improve the state of the world

Freedom, democracy and equality are some of the core values of the EU. In addition the EU has been governed by multilateralism, consent and principles of community and partnership since its inception even as the member states are very different from a cultural, economic and political point of view. “Unity in Diversity” is the claim merging all of these characteristics.

Web3 is built on the principles of decentralization, openness, permissionlessness, immutability, censorship-resistance and composability. This is true not only from a technological point of view but also from a social point of view which created a new way of coordination and governance.

From all jurisdictions the values and principles of the EU are most aligned with Web3. And from all ways of coordination and governance Web3 is most aligned with the EU.

Web3 can catalyze the economy and society to become fairer, with more agency and more regenerative. The ability of web3 to disintermediate middlemen strengthens the bargaining power of individuals and organizations. In addition it can be an enabling factor for digital and data sovereignty as e.g. pursued by the GAIA-X initiative. With new forms of ownership and governance powered by Web3, platforms can become community-owned and -governed to shift power back to creators and users and other actors contributing to value creation. This has the potential to ultimately offer an alternative to single company platforms like bigtech.

With the “Green Deal ‘’ sustainability and regenerativeness have become top priority in the EU. One way of pursuing these goals is by internalizing externalities like the use of natural resources and pollution. Web3 can help with that by tokenizing and pricing public goods and bads (e.g. carbon offset rights). By that sustainable and regenerative behavior ist directly incentivized without the need to overregulate. In that sense markets are upgraded for public good.

The EU needs to further be supportive and even lead the Web3 movement via Web3-enabling regulation and regulatory sandboxes. Startups, Enterprises and any organization in the EU can benefit from Web3 business model innovation which enables a more efficient, fair and regenerative value creation. This could continue to attract the best Web3 talent in the world and make the EU the center of the next Wave of digital innovation — The Web3 innovation wave.

Combining the best of both worlds — Traditional Organizational Design meets DAOs

Rocketstars and launchers all experience equal rights and are driven by the same foundational values.

Operational challenges and tasks are addressed in missions. Every member can propose to launch a mission and the SCE will decide upon. Important decisions in the Rocketstar Foundation are all taken by votes that every member can participate in. The SCE will experiment around the concept of decentralized decision making with quadratic voting and staking for decisions about missions. Once missions reach a bigger size, squads will form as subgroups to pursue larger collaborative tasks.

They aim to prove that a DAO can be efficient and democratic at the same time. And the founding crew is looking forward to experimenting with traditional organizations as well as Web3 projects to create an organizational design that combines the best of both worlds.

Lift Off of Rocketstar SCE

April 2022 is historic as with Rocketstar SCE the first DAO ever incorporated as an SCE. As the SCE is the only legal construct to really portray DAO characteristics, they believe there will be many DAOs to follow. And Rocketstar Foundation is already gaining traction with their first missions. So expect further news from Rocketstar Foundation soon.

The Supermission

They are committed to advancing Enterprise and DAO compatibility and innovation by bridging the two worlds and applying a holistic view. Two missions are about to be launched. Watch out for news about these events soon. Enterprise Web3 Network (EW3N) will aim to upgrade business models with Web3 capabilities and drive Web3 adoption. Pink Tapir will allow for cross-organizational people data collaboration to allow organizations to switch to thrive mode from survival mode.

This will require the crew to grow. The future will be bright. 🚀⭐🏛