👋Welcome to Hats Protocol
The onchain roles protocol. Empower contributors and code with the responsibility, authority, and accountability needed to get things done.
Introduction
Hats Protocol is the backbone for decentralized work. Hats empowers groups to get things done by delegating responsibilities to the right contributors, giving them the hard and soft authorities they need to do their work, and installing real-time accountability mechanisms to ensure people follow through.
You can be decentralized AND get things done. This is the power of Hats Protocol.
What Are Hats?
Hats are programmable, revocable, and legible roles, which can be collectively controlled by the wearer of the "Top Hat", which could be an individual or a group, such as a DAO. Hat-based roles can be flexibly imbued with responsibilities, authorities, accountabilities, context, and more.
Hats are represented onchain by tokens that conform to the ERC-1155 standard. They are connected together in a tree structure (aka a "Hats tree") to create flexible operational and governance structures that are controlled by an organization or its designees, which can then be visualized in any Hats front-end.
Hats tokens can be held by any address including an EOA, multisig, or contract. When an address has a balance of 1 of a given Hats token, it is considered a "wearer" of that "hat". Then, by way of various token-gates, that address is granted the authorities that have been associated with that hat.
Each hat can have any number of wearers up to the hat’s max supply. Hats are granted and revoked by the organization, or agents/smart contracts that are designated by the org. Wearers can renounce a hat, but they cannot transfer it.
Why Should We Use Hats?
Using Hats, groups can create and manage roles that unlock the power of decentralized work.
Decentralized work could be amazing. But collective governance is hard. Today, decentralized organizations like DAOs and networks are making tradeoffs between decentralization and effectiveness. What they’re missing is a familiar piece of organizational infrastructure: roles.
Decentralized organizations need a better way of delegating and revoking roles, responsibilities, and authorities to get things done. You no longer have to choose decentralization or effectiveness: you can get things done while simultaneously embodying the values of decentralization and autonomy.
Groups that use Hats will:
Delegate authorities to individuals or teams while retaining ultimate control by the collective
Experience less pain and administrative costs associated with managing contributors and transferring authorities from one person or team to another
Effectively hold contributors accountable to their commitments
Clearly understand what’s actually happening across the group at any point in time, including where any gaps exist
Contributors who wear Hats will:
Feel clear about the roles and responsibilities they are accountable for
Instantly have all the authorities they need to do their work (e.g., discord role, wiki admin rights, multisig signer, twitter access, etc.)
Know who to go to for important information or decisions
Understand which roles are not yet fulfilled that they could be eligible for
Developer Documentation
The next few pages are devoted to documentation for Hats usage and Hats Tree setup by Hat Wearers, such as DAO governance facilitators, operations managers, and summoners.
In these pages, we emphasize the usage of the first front-end built by Haberdasher Labs for this purpose, but recognize that there will be many apps that are able to interact with Hats Protocol in our open-source ecosystem.
If you're a developer looking for more technical documentation, including contract functions, SDK details, subgraph information, and integration help, please jump directly to the "For Developers" section of these docs:
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