Is this the future of how companies and organizations will be run?

A new decentralized autonomous organization management platform is being built on Polkadot — and aims to shake up the way organizations are run.

Companies, open-source projects, foundations, hedge funds and NGOs are among the entities that can be created and managed through the Idavoll Network.

Basic functions such as shareholder votes, disputes and accounting matters can be executed with ease — and the organization’s behavior and operating rules are enshrined through the use of smart contracts, delivering “openness, fairness and justice” to all.

Anyone within an organization can submit proposals that their peers can vote on, and a dispute mechanism is in place so shareholders can protect their interests.

Idavoll provides a suite of templates that act as the foundation for users who want to create an organization — all of which can be customized around their specific needs. For example, particular votes may require a higher threshold to be passed than others, and some stakeholders may need to have greater permissions than others.

One major concern is ensuring that a DAO can be scalable when its number of members increases. A solution being explored by Idavoll involves the creation of committees, where members can be organized into specialist groups that match their interests, and are given a specific set of tasks and responsibilities.

The network also enables membership-style organizations to be set up, with non-transferable tokens being used to denote membership. A “one vote, one member” approach is used for the governance process, meaning everyone gets to have an equal say in crucial decisions.

A self-sufficient universe

Idavoll recently completed a financing round — and says it attracted support from well-known investors including DFG, YBB, Oasis and Chain Capital.

The project’s name comes from a magical valley that features in Scandinavian mythology — a place where the gods would take meetings and sign deals.

Those behind Idavoll explained: “As ancient gods used to divide their responsibilities to better rule the universe, organizations working on Idavoll protocol will be able to delegate decisions to its members, control their activities and rule our disputes, while staying completely on the decentralized chain. It’s a self-sufficient universe, where each organization can renew itself and maintain its identity forever.”

One benefit lies in how any DeFi project on Ethereum will be able to run its heavy governance process on the Idavoll Network — sidestepping scalability issues and enabling them to complete decentralized DAO management at low cost.

A three-stage plan

The first step in the development of Idavoll Network has focused on creating a minimum viable product in the form of a DApp, that all DAO users can interact with. From here, a greater range of customizable templates are being introduced — including a court that can resolve disputes through the use of jurors. The ultimate ambition is to provide on-chain governance for communities on the Ethereum network and across other chains.

Idavoll says that insufficient interoperability is going to become a barrier to development in the future — and the status quo, which sees hundreds of blockchain projects operating in an independent ecosystem divorced from other networks, needs to change.

Based on the Substrate 2.0 development framework, Idavoll Network is set to launch on the Polkadot mainnet in the second quarter of 2021.