Ethelo is a world leader in digital governance. Named “Best for the World” in governance by B Corp, in 2020, 2021 Ethelo was ranked the world’s #1 ranked digital democracy platform. More than $10B has been allocated using Ethelo by hundreds of governments, businesses and nonprofit organizations over the past decade, empowering communities to solve complex financial, policy and practical challenges in a fair and democratic way.

Digital governance has emerged as a key challenge for Distributed Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), a new form of collective entity emerging from cryptocurrency and blockchain technology. DAOs are communities built around assets on a blockchain and use “smart contracts” to hard-code finance and other organizational processes. These new “Web3” communities offer a radical new approach to organizing groups of people and large pools of capital towards a wide variety of business and non-profit objectives. Unlike second-generation social media and content platforms like Youtube and Facebook, Web3 offers trusted, decentralized platforms where people have real ownership and control of their identity, their content and their assets.

In the 5 years since the first DAO was built using Ethereum, the funds under DAO management have grown to more than 45 billion USD. However, their very decentralization has exposed problems of governance capacity and unanticipated situations have demonstrated the inherent incompleteness of predetermined contracts.

Andreessen Horowitz has identified DAO governance as one of the key crypto challenges warranting investment. Ethelo will solve the problem of DAO governance by extending its powerful platform into the Web3 space. The flexible, decentralized decision algorithms which have made Ethelo the world leader are a perfect fit for decentralized DAO governance. With tens of thousands of hours of hands-on experience managing digital decisions, no one is better positioned than Ethelo to help DAOs leapfrog over the limits of majority voting to vastly better approaches consensus and collective action.

Ethelo will enter the market as a provider of governance services to leading DAOs such as Gitcoin, Bankless, Friends with Benefits, Uniswap and others, implementing bespoke applications of its current platform for key decisions. Our initial focus will be granting and fund allocation - a sharp pain point. We will move to release a Web3 toolkit and API for custom smart contract integration. We will provide a foundational decision management interface that will serve the whole Web3 market. We will provide key technology infrastructure for digital decision-making for DAOs and by extension the whole crypto space. We will then extend that DAO technology into the traditional web2 space, providing token micro-payment systems to large participant panels for public decision processes by government processes. Using that same framework we will begin to compete with traditional polling, opinion research and market testing platforms.