Never before in history has this many people relied on digital connectivity—a recent Meta survey found that 77% of respondents indicated “the most important group they’re a part of now operates online.” The recent surge of DAOs and Web3-native communities is opening new doors for these online groups to blend how they play, socialize and earn together. 

New York-based startup Koop is propelling themselves into this new frontier by creating value for the operational arms of internet-native organizations, regardless of size. Given the recent momentum of NFTs, which are set to play a major role in DAO governance, Koop’s protocol combines tools for a shared treasury, a bounty system and NFT gated memberships. Recently raising a $2 million funding round from investors including 1confirmation (early investors of OpenSea), Koop aims to make project management and community building easy for any group– from small organizations that curate NFT art to investor syndicates that pool capital.

How Does Koop Work?

According to the company website, Koop’s recently launched platform integrates with the following tools for community and treasury management:

1. Group purchasing of NFTs: communities can “batch” purchase multiple NFTs in a single click and all funds and assets are routed directly to Koop treasuries.
2. Community airdropping: members can send NFTs or tokens as gifts to white-listed addresses of their choice.
3. Stream payments internally: communities can seamlessly split assets or payments with their team.

Across these tools, Koop hopes to offer an improved layer of checks and balances for community governance. The platform offers both off-chain voting and on-chain execution for proposals, with all voting power tied to staked NFT memberships. Koop is also actively building on Layer 2 solutions, which will enable new frameworks of governance previously limited by the fee-heavy Ethereum chain.  

Some of these features aren’t unique to Koop: Juicebox and Gnosis Safe are popular tools that have gained a lot of traction last year for treasury governance. However, Koop’s CEO Natalia Murillo seeks to solve challenges in group treasury management, which up to this point have dealt with poor contribution tracking, unreliable distribution channels and counterintuitive user experience. 

Koop is Empowering Web3 Journeys

In an interview, Murillo said “we want to empower groups of friends to work for themselves, to team up with other groups on projects and maybe even contribute to a DAO.” 

The DAO ecosystem has already proven that, with or without economic incentives, value-aligned participants are eager to take on more responsibility to build the organization. Koop is aiming to replace Discord badges and Telegram polls with two main tools:

1. Bounty system: contributors can be rewarded for completing tasks through POAP badges or monetary reward from the community.
   
2. NFT-gated memberships: collectives will have the option to customize the memberships they offer (using NFTs) to incentivize a range of member engagement.

The recent explosion of new use cases for NFTs such as token gating is no surprise given their transferable nature and secure proof of ownership. Now, Koop hopes to leverage bounties as a reputation-building tool for collectives to engage and properly compensate their members based on work of any kind (read more about the future of work). 

Leveraging Partnerships

Unlike previous rigid frameworks, the next era of DAO tooling is modular and flexible: serving the ever-evolving needs of communities of every size and purpose. According to the company, Koop is currently working with partners such as Gen Z influencer Jake Paul and Web3 investor Li Jin to create a crowdfunding platform and online learning tools. 

Murillo said “Koop seeks to enable any social community to bootstrap projects or investments and eventually empower individuals to do more on their own.” They want to continue helping these communities externalize their social products and reach. 

Reshaping Digital Collectives

Creators and builders of today are shaping the internet of the future, where companies are owned and operated by their users. New protocols like Koop are making Web3 a viable path for groups to make meaningful and secure contributions on the internet.

This year will embolden a new generation of digital collectives. They will operate in a fully distributed manner and at an accelerated scale of services without depending on a central coordinating actor– traditionally the firm. We are still at the beginnings of Web3 tooling, where only few softwares such as Koop empower groups to produce cooperatively and generate wealth as a whole. Innovation for decentralized organizations is set to open the floodgates for collectives around the world.

Koop will be launching later this March. 

This article was written by an affiliate of Koop. 

ABOUT THE WRITER 

Ivy Tsang is a Tech Innovation Fellow at Identity Review from the University of Southern California, where she explores the intersections between the Arts, Technology and Business of Innovation. 

Contact Ivy at ivy@identityreview.com. 

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