We've spent 3.5 years solving the problem that killed 95% of DAOs. And we think we finally cracked it.

In our previous article, we explained that the real problem in DAOs is the Delegation Trilemma: a fundamental tradeoff between effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and hardness that every DAO must navigate.

The question is: how do we make optimal delegations in the face of these tradeoffs?

The answer, we believe, lies in two breakthrough technologies that are fundamentally changing what's possible:

1. AI — drastically changing the tradeoff between effectiveness and cost, but introduces alignment risk when we delegate to it

2. Programmable Hardness — allowing us to apply the automation and flexibility gains from AI to the hardness dimension itself

When combined, these technologies go beyond the existing Pareto frontier. They push the frontier outward and enable combinations of effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and hardness that were previously impossible.

But to actually leverage these technologies in practice, we need a comprehensive framework of delegation that we can encode in smart contracts.

To that end, today we are introducing the Trust Zones Framework.

The framework is a programmatic approach to designing optimal delegations. You identify which tradeoffs matter most, then systematically design delegations that optimize for your goals.

Most importantly, because the framework is designed to be encoded into smart contracts, it turns organizational design into programmable infrastructure. Now, you can create, nest, and dynamically adjust delegations with the speed and precision of software.

A trust zone is a programmable container for delegation.

Instead of delegating directly to an agent, you delegate into a zone that defines precisely what the agent can do and under what conditions you can trust them to do it. The principal remains outside the zone, while the agent operates within it.

The key question becomes: what are the specific levers you can pull to construct a trust zone? What dimensions can you actually configure?

Across both its boundary and contents, every trust zone is defined by seven configurable parameters. These parameters and the specific mechanisms that create them, map the entire design space for delegation. They are the comprehensive toolkit for trust zone design.

Each parameter has an impact on the overall Delegation Trilemma properties of the zone. Ownership alignment, for example, tends to increase both effectiveness and hardness, but at higher cost. Adding a higher-threshold decision model increases hardness but may decrease effectiveness.

The power of having all seven parameters to play with is that you can select exactly the mix that results in the properties you need for each specific delegation.

The ability to program delegation like software has three big implications for building better organizations:

First: Granular control. Depending on the thresholds in the trilemma dimensions you need to hit, you can combine the effects of any or all of the hardness-building parameters in a variety of configurations.

Second: Nesting. You can nest trust zones to break down larger responsibilities into smaller, specialized zones with tailored parameters. Since hardness prevents risk from flowing up the delegation tree, nesting improves aggregate effectiveness and cost for the same level of hardness.

Third: Multiple agent types. You can select from different types of agents while remaining inside the same cryptoeconomic safeguards:

• Human agents bring creativity and judgment, but require more hardness

• Group agents (multisigs, DAOs) combine expertise with collective decision-making, reducing capture risk while maintaining flexibility

• Smart contract agents can self-constrain and are perfect for managing other trust zones, implementing algorithmic decisions, or leveraging the intelligence of markets

• AI agents offer major cost savings, though their alignment uncertainty may require additional hardness parameters

The process of designing and implementing each delegation is itself costly. By encoding trust-building mechanisms directly into smart contracts, we transform hardness from a bespoke, labor-intensive process into reusable, composable infrastructure.

Once a mechanism is built (like voting systems, timelocks, spending limits) it can be deployed instantly and combined with other mechanisms.

Hardness becomes a zero-marginal-cost building block.

Hats Protocol v1 served as a great start to this, making roles and permissions programmable and composable. The next step is to fully protocolize the Trust Zones Framework itself, creating factories and APIs to deploy all of the mechanisms that instantiate the seven framework parameters.

The result is that the implementation cost of hardness approaches zero, while its reliability remains absolute.

On the AI side, we’ve already talked about using AI agents within these hard organizational structures to automate work, getting significantly lower costs without needing to give up hardness.

The next advancement is to leverage AI to bring down the costs of delegation itself. Now we can reap the benefits of AI for reducing both the cost of executing work and the cost of designing how to delegate it.

These two breakthroughs multiply each other's impact. Programmable hardness makes delegation cheap to implement, but only if you know what to implement. AI makes delegation cheap to design, but only if there's infrastructure to deploy the designs into.

Together, they create a flywheel: AI designs increasingly sophisticated delegations because the infrastructure can support them, while the infrastructure becomes more powerful because AI can fully leverage its composability. Organizations can iterate at software speed, optimizing continuously rather than settling for "good enough."

Where before you might create 5-10 delegations for your entire DAO, you can now create hundreds of precisely-tuned trust zones with minimal overhead.

This is how DAOs go from theoretically interesting but practically limited, to genuinely competitive with traditional organizations: by making it cheap enough to optimize every single delegation.

To put this framework into practice, we're launching Gardnr, a custom AI agent built specifically for designing and implementing trust zones.

Named after the solution to coordination from Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch," Gardnr is trained on our learnings from working on Hats Protocol for the last 3.5 years, including inspiration from our organizational design work with EigenLayer, Maker, Safe, zkSync and more.

Gardnr can:

• Help you understand and apply the Trust Zones Framework

• Analyze your existing organization to identify the trust zones you already have

• Design brand new trilemma-optimized trust zones tailored to your needs

• Output them in YAML files ready for deployment

• Soon: automatically deploy them to your blockchain of choice

Gardnr also references publicly available DAO proposals from the Ethereum ecosystem and is powered by Claude 4.5. It will rapidly improve with usage and feedback.

We've presented the Trust Zones Framework; a comprehensive, programmatic approach to solving the Delegation Trilemma.

Where the Trilemma showed us the real problem with DAOs, Trust Zones gives us the tools to actually solve it.

By combining two frontier-expanding technologies—AI and programmable hardness—and giving ourselves a rigorous framework for leveraging them, we can build organizations that are harder, more effective, and more cost efficient than ever before.

Now it's time to put theory into practice. Try designing a new trust zone with Gardnr and give us feedback. If you're interested in applying the Trust Zones Framework to your organization, get in touch.

The future of organizations is programmable. Let's build it together.

We've spent 3.5 years solving the problem that killed 95% of DAOs. And we think we finally cracked it.

In our previous article, we explained that the real problem in DAOs is the Delegation Trilemma: a fundamental tradeoff between effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and hardness that every DAO must navigate.

The question is: how do we make optimal delegations in the face of these tradeoffs?

The answer, we believe, lies in two breakthrough technologies that are fundamentally changing what's possible:

1. AI — drastically changing the tradeoff between effectiveness and cost, but introduces alignment risk when we delegate to it

2. Programmable Hardness — allowing us to apply the automation and flexibility gains from AI to the hardness dimension itself

When combined, these technologies go beyond the existing Pareto frontier. They push the frontier outward and enable combinations of effectiveness, cost-efficiency, and hardness that were previously impossible.

But to actually leverage these technologies in practice, we need a comprehensive framework of delegation that we can encode in smart contracts.

To that end, today we are introducing the Trust Zones Framework.

The framework is a programmatic approach to designing optimal delegations. You identify which tradeoffs matter most, then systematically design delegations that optimize for your goals.

Most importantly, because the framework is designed to be encoded into smart contracts, it turns organizational design into programmable infrastructure. Now, you can create, nest, and dynamically adjust delegations with the speed and precision of software.

A trust zone is a programmable container for delegation.

Instead of delegating directly to an agent, you delegate into a zone that defines precisely what the agent can do and under what conditions you can trust them to do it. The principal remains outside the zone, while the agent operates within it.

The key question becomes: what are the specific levers you can pull to construct a trust zone? What dimensions can you actually configure?

Across both its boundary and contents, every trust zone is defined by seven configurable parameters. These parameters and the specific mechanisms that create them, map the entire design space for delegation. They are the comprehensive toolkit for trust zone design.

Each parameter has an impact on the overall Delegation Trilemma properties of the zone. Ownership alignment, for example, tends to increase both effectiveness and hardness, but at higher cost. Adding a higher-threshold decision model increases hardness but may decrease effectiveness.

The power of having all seven parameters to play with is that you can select exactly the mix that results in the properties you need for each specific delegation.

The ability to program delegation like software has three big implications for building better organizations:

First: Granular control. Depending on the thresholds in the trilemma dimensions you need to hit, you can combine the effects of any or all of the hardness-building parameters in a variety of configurations.

Second: Nesting. You can nest trust zones to break down larger responsibilities into smaller, specialized zones with tailored parameters. Since hardness prevents risk from flowing up the delegation tree, nesting improves aggregate effectiveness and cost for the same level of hardness.

Third: Multiple agent types. You can select from different types of agents while remaining inside the same cryptoeconomic safeguards:

• Human agents bring creativity and judgment, but require more hardness

• Group agents (multisigs, DAOs) combine expertise with collective decision-making, reducing capture risk while maintaining flexibility

• Smart contract agents can self-constrain and are perfect for managing other trust zones, implementing algorithmic decisions, or leveraging the intelligence of markets

• AI agents offer major cost savings, though their alignment uncertainty may require additional hardness parameters

The process of designing and implementing each delegation is itself costly. By encoding trust-building mechanisms directly into smart contracts, we transform hardness from a bespoke, labor-intensive process into reusable, composable infrastructure.

Once a mechanism is built (like voting systems, timelocks, spending limits) it can be deployed instantly and combined with other mechanisms.

Hardness becomes a zero-marginal-cost building block.

Hats Protocol v1 served as a great start to this, making roles and permissions programmable and composable. The next step is to fully protocolize the Trust Zones Framework itself, creating factories and APIs to deploy all of the mechanisms that instantiate the seven framework parameters.

The result is that the implementation cost of hardness approaches zero, while its reliability remains absolute.

On the AI side, we’ve already talked about using AI agents within these hard organizational structures to automate work, getting significantly lower costs without needing to give up hardness.

The next advancement is to leverage AI to bring down the costs of delegation itself. Now we can reap the benefits of AI for reducing both the cost of executing work and the cost of designing how to delegate it.

These two breakthroughs multiply each other's impact. Programmable hardness makes delegation cheap to implement, but only if you know what to implement. AI makes delegation cheap to design, but only if there's infrastructure to deploy the designs into.

Together, they create a flywheel: AI designs increasingly sophisticated delegations because the infrastructure can support them, while the infrastructure becomes more powerful because AI can fully leverage its composability. Organizations can iterate at software speed, optimizing continuously rather than settling for "good enough."

Where before you might create 5-10 delegations for your entire DAO, you can now create hundreds of precisely-tuned trust zones with minimal overhead.

This is how DAOs go from theoretically interesting but practically limited, to genuinely competitive with traditional organizations: by making it cheap enough to optimize every single delegation.

To put this framework into practice, we're launching Gardnr, a custom AI agent built specifically for designing and implementing trust zones.

Named after the solution to coordination from Scott Alexander's "Meditations on Moloch," Gardnr is trained on our learnings from working on Hats Protocol for the last 3.5 years, including inspiration from our organizational design work with EigenLayer, Maker, Safe, zkSync and more.

Gardnr can:

• Help you understand and apply the Trust Zones Framework

• Analyze your existing organization to identify the trust zones you already have

• Design brand new trilemma-optimized trust zones tailored to your needs

• Output them in YAML files ready for deployment

• Soon: automatically deploy them to your blockchain of choice

Gardnr also references publicly available DAO proposals from the Ethereum ecosystem and is powered by Claude 4.5. It will rapidly improve with usage and feedback.

We've presented the Trust Zones Framework; a comprehensive, programmatic approach to solving the Delegation Trilemma.

Where the Trilemma showed us the real problem with DAOs, Trust Zones gives us the tools to actually solve it.

By combining two frontier-expanding technologies—AI and programmable hardness—and giving ourselves a rigorous framework for leveraging them, we can build organizations that are harder, more effective, and more cost efficient than ever before.

Now it's time to put theory into practice. Try designing a new trust zone with Gardnr and give us feedback. If you're interested in applying the Trust Zones Framework to your organization, get in touch.

The future of organizations is programmable. Let's build it together.