🎩Creating My First Hat

Hats Protocol is flexible and powerful enough to serve as the backbone for your decentralized work, comprising the roles, responsibilities, authorities, and accountabilities across a community or organization.

While there are many ways you can deploy Hats to support your decentralized work, getting started is simple.

First create a new Hats tree using this link, then follow the instructions in this video to build out your structure with additional Hats

You can get started with Hats in two steps:

1. Creating a new tree

2. Creating your first child hat

After you've created a new Hats tree and your first child hat, you will be ready to add wearers to give all wearers of the hat the authorities and accountabilities they need to get things done.

Following are instructions for creating a new Hats tree and your first child hat:

1. Creating a new tree

Hats are organized in a tree structure, called a "Hats tree". Each tree can hold all the hats for a given organization, or you could create a new tree for each team or project (you can always link trees together later).

In either case, the first step to creating a new Hats tree is to create the "Top Hat": the root of a Hats tree which serves as a super-admin for all of the other hats that will be added to the tree.

The Top Hat

The broadest authority of your Hats tree is represented by the Top Hat. This is the first hat you will create; you can think of it as the super-admin of the entire Hats tree. Top Hats should be worn by the highest-level governance surface of your organization. That said, when you're just getting started it's usually OK to first mint the Top Hat to an address you control and then transfer the Top Hat to the organization's address later.

To create a new tree

• Visit the Hats app
• Connect your wallet

• Select "Create a new tree" (or visit this link)
• Add an image

• Enter the name and description for your new Hats Tree (the name and description of a Top Hat effectively serves as the name and description for its full tree)

• Enter the address that will wear this Top Hat (see The Top Hat above for recommendations on where to mint the Top Hat)

• Ensure you are creating this tree on the right network; you can change the network by selecting the network icon in the banner

• Select "Create" and confirm the transaction through your wallet

Creating a new Hats tree starts with creating that tree's Top Hat

2. Creating your first child hat

Once your new tree is created with the tree's Top Hat minted to an address you control, you can create your first child hat(s). To create a child hat:

• Select "Edit Tree"

• On the Top Hat's card, select "Create Hat <child hat ID>"

• You'll be able to set the hat's basic details, add wearers, create/add eligibility and/or toggle modules and more. As long as you keep the hat mutable for now, you can always change these properties later as long as you're wearing a hat that is an admin of this new hat (such as the Top Hat, which is an admin for all other hats in the tree).

• You can continue to use Edit Mode to add as many hats and change any details for existing hats as you wish, making sure to click "Save" after each change.

• Finally, select "Deploy" to update your changes in the chain.

Congratulations, you've created a new Hats tree and your first child hat! You can now continue to create additional hats throughout the tree. See What Hats Do I Need? for suggestions on which hats your group may need.

Each of the hats you create can then be connected with authorities and minted to one or more wearers to give them the authorities associated with those hats.