Station was founded on a simple premise: there are new ways to mobilize a group of strangers to do cool things on the Internet.

Creating a movement requires a few important steps: broadcasting a shared vision, finding the right members, aligning incentives, getting funded, and effectively allocating the funds to achieve the set goal.

Armed with god-like technologies such as generative AI and crypto, our collective ability to create, interpret, and monetize information has increased by orders of magnitude. However, the gained productivity doesn’t always translate into the most aligned outcomes for creators, participants, and users of Internet products.

Despite the theoretical promises of DAOs, the experience of creating and operating one leaves many disillusioned. Gas on Ethereum mainnet costs more than a small bounty payout amount. Setting up a bounty and delegating takes more time than just doing the work. Decisions can take months to reach consensus and often don’t result in execution. The tradability and transferability of voting power — when not properly designed — makes shared treasury vulnerable to exploits. Most importantly, people come together to do what they want: create great products, stories, research, and experience, rather than designing organizations and incentive structures from the ground up.

We believe a better way is possible. The forces of digital-native collectives that make ideas happen, own one’s creation, and share value with aligned players are unstoppable. We want to accelerate to that future, thoughtfully by making bootstrapping a network cheaper, faster, and more magical, while ensuring that the rails are designed intentionally to minimize collusion, erosion of trust, and centralization.

Introducing GroupOS

Introducing GroupOS, a modular toolkit powering digital collectives to own, govern, reward, and grow their networks, programmatically.

GroupOS is comprised of four core building blocks: Members, Vault, Tokens, and Insights. Each building block can be used independently as its tool, but the combination is greater than the sum of the parts.

We provide out-of-the-box configurations for the most common use cases, such as membership clubs, investment clubs, decentralized research groups, or open-source projects. With our developer-facing tooling and no–code block builder, we also create the sandbox for experimenting with new business models to emerge.

Members

Members sit at the core of GroupOS. Collectives can curate members, track contributions and reputation, and engage stakeholders through evolving onchain accounts. Each account can be a permanent onchain record or an evolving account built on the new ERC-6551 standard, the foundation for interoperable and programmatic social, reputation, and rewards systems. The Membership system defines permission and access across applications to ensure that the people governing the network have earned, rather than bought, the rights to do so.

Vault

Vaults manage collectively owned assets with multi-signature and customizable governance patterns. Designed with the goal of full automation and flexibility, we leverage ERC-4337 and a new nonce storage system to abstract away gas payments and parallelize the ordering of executions. Members can create, manage, and distribute assets in the Vault via proposals and make decisions based on their roles, governance power, or reputation.

Tokens

Tokens automate the rules and logic for value exchange and accrual in a network — ranging from in-game currencies to loyalty points. As the line between contributor-ship, membership, and customers blur, networks need flexible and programmatic ways to reward, refer, recognize, and manage stakeholders. We provide simple interfaces for community leaders and flexible APIs for developers, with no smart contract engineering required.

Insights

Understand the growth and sustainability of the network with advanced wallet-level and token-level analytics. By aggregating and orchestrating offchain and onchain data, we surface insights beyond just movements of tokens and wallets, but how the collective drives metrics that matter.

We envision the combinations of the blocks to unlock new primitives uniquely enabled by Web3 capabilities and applicable to use cases far beyond Web3.

Interoperable players. Interoperable games.

It’s important to remain pseudonymous in the cyber forest. Like Eric Huhges’ initial vision in the Cyberphunk Manifesto: “Privacy is the power to selectively reveal oneself to the world.”

We activate NFTs into “Playable Character,” a smart contract wallet enabling more flexible interactions with the rest of the Web3 ecosystem. When someone onboards to a new community, they are granted not only a digital symbol that represents their affiliation, but also the ability to traverse across products to accrue reputation, earn rewards, and access experiences. Imagine —

An MMORPG game can create portable characters for players with cosmetics and trophies bound to an interoperable account to participate in experiences beyond the game.
A community-oriented D2C brand can create portable shopper IDs for loyal customers with loyalty points and badges to participate in partnership discounts.
A decentralized electricity grid can create a household-based, interoperable identity system that accrues reputation for contributing excess resources during times of high demands redeemable for priority access to future resource allocation.

The possibilities are endless. Choose your player, and choose your game.

Programmatic value distribution

We make incentive design easy. The group can agree on how incentives get shared or rewards get distributed among members and across wallets and vaults. We provide out-of-the-box Recipes for you to get started with the most common mechanisms, such as recurring income, referral programs, or franchising models.

You can configure your value distribution logic through our APIs or onchain smart contracts, and choose to control these in the Station app or directly in code with help of developer documentation. No matter the use case, you can easily create an incentive program that works within your existing experiences.

The rules of the game can be made public or private based on settings to reduce risks of gamification and mercenary behaviors.

Decentralized idea machine

Our Vault block programmatically distributes collective assets to incentivize bottoms up contribution of members and shares upside when the ideas actualize. A decentralized idea machine is a meritocratic system that rewards those that contribute the most value, defined by the collective. The better the ideas, the larger the Vault grows.

You design the strategy, we provide the rails.

Stubborn protocols. Fluid interfaces.

Stubborn protocols mean that our protocols are secure and stable. They are the engine that governs the behaviors of the network and are fully owned by the collective.

Fluid interfaces mean that our UIs and APIs are minimalistic, customizable, and embeddable, creating the ultimate universality and flexibility that encapsulates the voices and vibes of the people — the rails quietly run in the background. The future of social infrastructure will consist of “pop-up apps.”

Pop-up apps are ephemeral interfaces built on shared data infrastructure and smart contract interfaces.

A playground for new social infrastructure

We’re still early in exploring the use cases of GroupOS. Beyond the immediate application for collective coordination and incentive distribution, we’re envisioning new forms of digital collectives to emerge. We’re collaborating with the crew at Other Internet, Polygon Village d.Camp, DAO Research Collective, and Mechanism Institute to explore new possibilities.

Here’s a snapshot of our early inquiries:

How can we automate value streams trustlessly and transparently while creating adaptive systems for emergent participant behaviors?
What are the new business models and financial possibilities when network participants own their data and digital assets?
How can we increase and ensure the efficacy, efficiency, and transparency of democratic governance over centralized technologies?
How can we leverage tokenomic primitives to align the interests of long-tail network participants and hedge the risks of centralized failure?
How can humans and autonomous agents (AI) collaborate and share the value they collectively generate?
How do collectives leverage their strengths, such as the economics of scale, risk diversification, and aggregated buying power, without needing 3rd-party entities?

Call for action

“We’re still early” is no longer an excuse. The time is now

Open-source innovations and projects are happening around the world. At the same time, the recent collapse of centralized banking infrastructure, the recursive chambers of institutional narratives, and the increasingly fragmented geopolitical landscape make the work we do not only necessary but urgent.

Suppose the most important ideas can’t take center stage because they can’t find alliances, get funded, or get distribution. How can we let the Internet do what it does best: empower ideas and movements on the fringes to thrive?

We’re working with leading collectives, protocols, and platforms that inspire us to rethink value distribution everywhere, from protocol grants programs to digital activist groups to decentralized energy grids. The journey has just begun, and we look to continue working closely with communities and protocols with a vision of collective ownership and bottoms-up participation.

If any of the below sounds like your platform, business, organization — or one you want to build, we’d like to have a conversation:

Looking to create an interoperable reputation and membership system to identify and incentivize high-quality participants
Looking to incentivize and engage with community members to participate in building the network
Looking to decentralize ownership and governance power to members in the network (can be both humans and machines!)
Looking to create and own portable network graphs for your users, audiences, and customers

If you are a designer, writer, or developer looking to reimagine the value infrastructure of the new internet, we have an ambitious roadmap ahead and hiring!

Join the movement.