Owned and governed by its network
Decentralization is genuine and staged. Economic control transfers to the DAO on published milestones, while safety and model releases stay with a transparent technical council. Real transfer of power, disciplined stewardship of safety.
Three parts, clear roles
A purpose bound Cayman foundation with no shareholders, stewarding the protocol, the ORB token, and the treasury, and funding grants. This is what makes the network a commons rather than a company's profit engine.
Token holder governance that progressively assumes control of reward rates, treasury allocation, protocol upgrades, and grants over roughly two to four years, on published milestones.
A technical body that holds model release decisions and the level zero safety constraints, operating transparently to the DAO. A frontier system cannot have its safety gate decided by a fluctuating vote.
How control transfers, in order
Each phase moves a defined slice of the network economy from the foundation to the DAO, on published milestones rather than all at once.
The foundation stewards the protocol and treasury, the DAO governance contracts are live, and the safety council holds the release gate from day one.
The DAO assumes the emission schedule within hard caps, the reward splits by tier and work type, and contribution multipliers.
The DAO directs compute procurement, ecosystem funding, liquidity, and the revenue funded buyback and burn cadence.
The DAO controls on chain contract upgrades behind timelocks and mandatory audits, with the safety carve out preserved.
The DAO fully owns the grants program and ecosystem development, completing the transfer of the network economy.
- Model release decisions
- Level zero safety constraints
- The kill switch
- Full transparency to the DAO
Decentralization with an adult in the room
Two things are deliberately not handed to a token vote: the model's release decisions and its safety constraints. A frontier capable system cannot have its safety gates decided by a fluctuating vote, but it can, and does, operate them in the open.
Real transfer of economic power to the DAO, disciplined stewardship of safety by a transparent council. Genuine decentralization, not theater.
Read the full governance design
The whitepaper specifies the entities, the transfer milestones, and the safety model in depth.