The Company Protocol
Overview
The Company Protocol was created to manage legal entities on-chain in a secure, reliable and scalable manner. It allows a legal entity to create a DAO with its own treasury, governance token and stakeholder roles for managing internal operations. The protocol has a contract factory which creates a Pool Contracts for legal entities by binding the entity’s metadata to the smart contract. This contract factory subsequently creates supporting contracts to service the Pool Contract. These supporting contracts include token contacts, invoice contracts and token generation events. Please refer to the Solidity API documentation for more details.
Protocol governance
The Company Protocol has a unified governance framework to host arbitration, maintenance and improvement facilities. Unified protocol governance was chosen for the following reasons :
- Standardisation of smart contracts : A unified code base for smart contracts created on the protocol will improve security for all companies using the protocol to create and manage their DAO. It also means that all of the companies operating on the protocol can make contributions to its development and grow the ecosystem and services for all participants.
- Compliance : The most efficient for our companies way to stay compliant with off-chain regulatory requirements is to outsource compliance and enforcement to a separate governing body on-chain.
- Dispute Resolution : Should any disputes arise due to fraud, malicious activity or miss-management, the protocol governance layer will, act as a private arbitration system for companies operating on the protocol.
- Access Recovery : Users are prone to loosing access to their funds or being hacked. Likewise, there is a matter of external transfer mechanism such as inheritance. Here, once again, it is better to have a governing body at the protocol level.
Over the long term, control over the Company Protocol will be transferred from its developers to the companies operating on the protocol in a participation based ownership scheme we refer to as TVL-based mining. In the near term, the plan is to an airdrop of protocol governance tokens for developers, early participants and independent foundations which will act as custodians of the protocol until the remaining governance tokens are mined and distributed. Once governance tokens are issued, control of the protocol rests in the hands of a committee constituted by the holders of the protocol governance tokens. The committee has the authority to perform a range of tasks necessary for the maintenance, regulation, and growth of the protocol and will appoint the following actors :
- Incorporators : The committee can designate a whitelist of addresses to act as incorporators. Incorporators have the unique capability of creating new pools that represent companies within the protocol. Each new company creation incurs a fee set by the committee.
- Enforcers: The committee also has the power to assign protocol enforcers, entities trusted with the ability to maintain the protocol's legal and compliance standards. These enforcers can freeze a company's contracts, forcibly transfer funds from a company's treasury, or even compel the transfer of a company's tokens. This mechanism ensures that all protocol participants adhere to the established rules and standards, and any missteps can be swiftly rectified.