Hat Admins & Hatter Contracts

The admin of every hat is another hat. This means that the authority to perform admin functions for a given hat is assigned to the wearer of its admin hat.

The scope of authority for a hat's admin is to determine who can wear it. This is reflected in the ability to create the hat and to mint or (for mutable hats) transfer the hat's token.

Transitive Admin Powers

In Hats Protocol v1, admin powers are transitive. All of a hat's ancestors — its direct admin, its admin's admin, etc — can serve as its admin.

Separation of Powers over Hats

In most contexts, an "admin" role has broad, generalized control over the entity it administers. Hats Protocol is different. The generalized control over a given hat is separated into three distinct roles:

Role	Powers
Admin	Create new hat Issue hat to wearer(s), aka “mint” Edit hat properties (while mutable) Transfer hat (while mutable)
Eligibility Module	Prevent ineligible addresses from wearing hat Revoke hat from specific wearer(s)
Toggle Module	Activate / de-active hat ⇒ all wearers lose the hat

Hatter Contracts

Logic contracts that serve as admins are informally known as "hatter" contracts. These are contracts that implement specific logic or rules. The admin of a hatter contract is the true admin, but has delegated said admin authority to the logic embedded in the hatter.

Hatter contract logic is a wide design space for DAOs. Here are some examples of hatter logic:

Hat creation	Allow certain addresses -- such as members of a DAO -- to create hats that are then admin'd by the DAO.
Hat minting	Allow certain addresses -- such as members of a DAO -- to mint hat tokens. Together with the above, a DAO could in this way enable its members to create and wear a certain type of hat permissionlessly. This would be especially if using hats to facilitate role clarity and legibility.
Wearer eligibility	Enforce certain requirements that prospective wearers must meet in order to wear a given hat, such as membership in a DAO or holding some token(s). Note that this is often more effectively implemented as an eligibility module.
Wearer staking	One particularly important type of eligibility requirement is staking tokens, DAO shares, or some other asset as a bond that could be slashed if the wearer is not a good steward of the accountabilities associated with the hat, or does not follow through on its associated responsibilities. Note that this is often more effectively implemented as an eligibility module.