Hey everyone, my name is Spencer, and I’m one of the cofounders of Haberdasher Labs, a core contributor to Hats Protocol.
Hats is a protocol for onchain roles, aka “hats” aka modular bundles of commitments, permissions/authorities/resources, eligibility criteria, accountability mechanisms, and compensation. Any account can have (“wear”) a hat, including EOAs, multisigs, DAOs, and other contracts; which gives them everything bundled into that particular hat.
Hats can have children, which results in a fractal tree-like structure. We see roles as the atomic unit of organizational structure, and we help organizations across the space use Hats to implement and organically evolve their own structure.
Last year, we participated in the Token Accountability MVP Program. You can learn more about what we built in that link. Notably, we integrated Hats with Sablier to handle the token streaming, but we could also have used other token distribution mechanisms such as Hedgey, Drips, or FactoryDAO’s depending on the specific needs of the grants program. Hedgey incorporating Hats into their own mvp is a great example of the kind of permissionless composability we love.
Hats Protocol is designed to integrate with any other mechanism, protocol, or app. Everything in Hats is modular and programmable, from controls over how new roles are created, to criteria for who is eligible to have a role, when/why somebody should have their role revoked, and what and how permissions are attached to roles.
This is a key part of our overall strategy and ethos: we embrace composability and have designed all of our technology to be maximally interoperable with other projects. We endeavor to make Hats easy to integrate into other systems.
In regards to token mechanics, Hats provides customizable infrastructure that allows for easy role assignment and access control for program admins, service providers and participants. For example, Hats can be used to permission access to capped minters by giving the Hat the minter role, unlocking automation potential for reward claiming in Token Programs. If a participant meets a specific metric and it can be verified onchain, the participant could claim the Hat that would give them the minting rights to the Capped Minter holding the reward.
If you are designing a new TPP, we would love to talk with you about how you can use Hats to help bring your vision to fruition.