A Framework for Progressive Decentralization

Summary:

Dog Years DAO will transition over time to become more decentralized. For the first several years, the core team maintains organizational control. Contributors and trial participants begin earning tokens that are equivalent to equity. Each core team member is responsible for creating teams that are funded by the DAO’s treasury. The amount of funding each department receives is determined by the core team at first, and then increasingly by the tokenholders. Each year, the DAO can exercise the option to buy some of the core team’s tokens, empowering them to increasingly decide the trajectory of the organization. 

Decentralization, like any organizational pattern, has both downsides and benefits. Many projects have trumpeted 'decentralized governance' without providing enough structure for a community to mature and flourish. Described below is a framework for 'progressive decentralization': one possible approach that could guide Dog Years DAO's evolution from a biotech startup with a few core members, to a research DAO conducting complex, longitudinal studies with hundreds of participants and collaborators. This document serves as a conceptual exploration and starting point for community discussion rather than a ratified plan.

Until the decentralized biomedicine vertical is fully realized, it is impractical for Bio DAOs to operate without a legal entity. Regulatory bodies like the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine require a legal entity with identifiable leadership to submit applications, respond to inquiries, and be held accountable for adverse events or protocol violations. Similarly, traditional investors require the legal protections that come with equity in a recognized corporate structure. Beyond regulatory and financial constraints, biomedical development requires deep expertise and rapid, coordinated decision-making. 

Progressive decentralization acknowledges this while creating a path toward shared governance. Trust must build bidirectionally: the community needs to trust that founders will relinquish control, rather than using “decentralization!” as marketing theater. Meanwhile, founders need to trust that token holders will make informed decisions that preserve scientific integrity rather than chasing short-term hype. This gradual transition allows both sides to demonstrate good faith over time, and just as importantly, allows for course correction. In the case of governance issues such as voter apathy, plutocratic capture, or decisions that compromise scientific validity, the remaining centralized control provides a safeguard. 

The goal is not decentralization for its own sake, but rather the pursuit of better outcomes: more durable research, broader participation, and treatments that serve the community that created them.

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The Four Phases of Progressive Decentralization

Dog Years DAO's transition from startup to community-governed research organization unfolds across four distinct phases, each expanding the scope of shared decision-making while maintaining the legal and operational structures necessary for regulated research.

Phase 1: Centralized Foundation

Dog Years, Inc. launches as a Wyoming C-corporation with the core team maintaining complete control over budget allocation and research direction. This centralized structure provides the legal entity that regulators require and the clear governance that early-stage investors demand. During this phase, tokens equivalent to equity are distributed to investors, contributors, and trial participants, establishing the foundation for future governance while the core team focuses on critical early milestones—protocol development, initial recruitment, and regulatory groundwork. The legal mechanics of this token-equity equivalence utilize Molecule's established framework for biotech DAOs, which will be detailed in forthcoming documentation. At this stage, token holders have economic rights but limited governance power, allowing the team to move quickly while the community observes, learns, and begins accumulating stake.

Phase 2: Community Building

As the project stabilizes and initial protocols are validated, contributors begin taking on operational responsibilities under the direction of core team members—recruitment, participant onboarding, data collection support, and community management. Token holders can now stake their tokens to become prospective DAO members, unlocking early governance participation and signaling long-term commitment rather than speculative intent. A critical governance milestone occurs when members vote to elect a representative to the corporation's advisory board, creating a formal channel for community voice in strategic decisions even while the board retains ultimate authority.

During Phase 2, the project begins minting IP-Tokens that represent fractional ownership of specific treatment intellectual property or commercialization rights. This innovation allows the DAO to raise capital for new research directions without diluting existing tokens, and enables other biotech DAOs or research organizations to participate in collaborative efforts by purchasing IP-Tokens tied to treatments they want to help develop. The founders retain the option to sell the entire project to a larger pharmaceutical company, but tag-along rights ensure that token holders can sell their tokens at the same valuation, preventing scenarios where founders profit while the community is left holding worthless tokens. 

Crucially, founders begin the deliberate work of documenting processes, decision frameworks, and institutional knowledge in preparation for eventual handover, transforming their tacit expertise into transferable systems.

Phase 3: Shared Governance

The balance of power shifts meaningfully in Phase 3. The DAO potentially exercises its options to purchase 20-50% of the company's equity from founders, with the purchase price and timeline negotiated based on the project's success and treasury health. Token holders now vote directly on research priorities—not day-to-day experimental decisions, but strategic choices about which treatments to pursue, which cohorts to prioritize, and how to allocate resources between different research directions. Joint committees form between the corporate board and DAO representatives to manage areas where both parties have legitimate interests: budget planning, major partnerships, and revenue deployment.

Revenue sharing agreements activate during this phase, meaning that as treatments reach market or licensing deals are struck, a defined percentage flows directly to the DAO treasury rather than being retained entirely by the corporation. Key decisions—particularly those involving major capital deployment, intellectual property licensing, or strategic partnerships—now require approval from both the board and the DAO, creating a genuine check-and-balance system. Core team members transition from universal decision-makers to department heads, building specialized teams for research operations, marketing, community management, and new treatment development. Each team develops its own internal governance structure appropriate to its function: research teams might operate by consensus among qualified scientists, while marketing teams might use delegated authority with quarterly reviews. Team funding becomes a hybrid model where both the founding team and DAO token holders vote on budget allocations, forcing alignment and preventing either party from unilaterally defunding valuable work.

The DAO exercises yearly options to purchase additional tokens from the founding team, gradually shifting the balance of ownership. What the DAO does with these purchased tokens becomes a governance decision itself: tokens can be burned to create scarcity and increase value for remaining holders, held in the treasury to maintain voting influence, or resold to strategic partners or new investors at appreciated values to fund expanded research. This mechanism provides a predictable path toward majority control while giving founders liquidity for their years of work and risk.

Phase 4: Decentralized Governance

In the final phase, the DAO achieves majority control through continued exercise of purchase options. Founders transition from operational leaders to advisors and service providers, still deeply involved but no longer holding executive authority. The full research roadmap is now controlled by token holders through proposal and voting systems, with the scientific team executing the community's strategic vision while maintaining methodological rigor. IP licensing decisions, partnership agreements, and commercialization strategies become DAO votes, ensuring that the community captures value from the intellectual property they helped create through participation and contribution.

The C-corporation doesn't disappear but transforms into the execution arm of DAO decisions: the legal entity that signs contracts, employs staff, submits regulatory filings, and maintains compliance with jurisdictional requirements. This structure acknowledges a practical reality: even in a fully decentralized future, regulators will need a legally accountable entity to interact with, and certain agreements (insurance contracts, real estate leases, employment arrangements) function more smoothly within traditional corporate structures. The DAO sets direction and priorities; the company implements and operates. Control has been progressively transferred, but the scaffolding that enables regulated research remains intact.

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Governance Tools for Scientific Decentralization

As Dog Years DAO transitions toward shared and eventually decentralized governance, several specialized tools might help maintain scientific rigor while preventing common pitfalls of token-based decision making. Quadratic voting becomes particularly valuable when founder and DAO votes merge in Phase 3—by making vote costs increase quadratically (voting twice costs four times as much in tokens, voting three times costs nine times as much), it prevents whales from dominating decisions while ensuring that passionate minorities can still have meaningful influence on research direction. Forking and ragequitting mechanisms provide essential safety valves: if a team fundamentally disagrees with a governance decision, they can exit with their proportional share of treasury assets to continue their work independently, preventing both gridlock and the suppression of promising research directions that may be unpopular with the majority.

Drip conviction voting addresses a critical challenge for long-term research: traditional snapshot voting can create feast-or-famine funding cycles that disrupt ongoing studies. Instead, token holders continuously signal their support for different teams, with funding streams adjusting gradually over time based on sustained conviction. This allows underperforming projects to lose funding smoothly while protecting valuable longitudinal studies from sudden termination due to voter whims or temporary sentiment shifts. Finally, crypto-certification of participants and clinical science associates creates an immutable, auditable chain of custody for clinical data—each person who handles data cryptographically signs their contributions, establishing both accountability and transparency. This is crucial for regulatory acceptance and scientific validity, as it provides verifiable provenance for all data without requiring centralized gatekeepers, decentralizing trust in the scientific process itself.

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Conclusion: A New Model for Scientific Progress

Progressive decentralization offers a path beyond the false choice between move-fast-and-break-things crypto governance and traditional corporate biotech structures. By allowing VCs to invest through conventional equity while community members earn tokens through participation and contribution, Dog Years DAO creates a hybrid model where capital and community work in concert rather than competition. Traditional investors receive the protections and governance rights they require, while token holders gain meaningful influence over research direction and the opportunity to capture value from their contributions—whether that's enrolling their dog in a study, recruiting participants, or conducting scientific work. This approach acknowledges that both groups bring essential resources: VCs provide the concentrated capital needed for expensive regulatory pathways, while distributed communities provide the scale, domain expertise, and long-term commitment that longitudinal studies demand.

The status quo in biotech is fundamentally extractive: patients, pet owners, and communities provide their data, time, and trust, yet capture almost none of the value when treatments succeed. Progressive decentralization inverts this dynamic. Participants become stakeholders. Contributors become co-owners. The community that makes the research possible shares in its success, creating aligned incentives throughout the value chain. By gradually transferring control from founders to tokenholders, the DAO can mature into an organization that serves its community rather than extracting from it. The goal is not just to create new longevity treatments for dogs (though that alone would be worthwhile!) but to demonstrate a replicable model for conducting large-scale human longevity studies where participants are partners, not subjects. If successful, Dog Years DAO becomes both a research organization and a blueprint: proof that decentralized science can maintain rigor while distributing power, and that communities can govern complex, multi-year research programs without sacrificing the discipline that regulatory approval demands.