what are Ricardian Contracts?
Imagined in 1998, Ian Griggs described law that is a combination of traditional legalese and programming language.
There are modern versions of it, including the spiritually concerning ‘borg’ narrative (chiral evil to moloch) and Ross Campbell’s Ricardian LLC:
The problem with these solutions is that they don’t have the permissionless chain-of-title modularity we need to realize Unix philosophy in Ricardian operating systems.
Hats as ricardian roles (“ricard-roles”)
I believe Hats Protocol, if done in a particular way, offers permissionless ricardian contract chain-of-title modularity.
Thinking about contract law, the Agreement module in Hats v1 is not an agreement since it does not include the privity element of contract law.
But by chaining the agreement-module-as-a-hat with other modules-as-hats, we can create one-to-one or one-to-many privity relationships.
In the Lex.Clinic tree above example, the Allowlist module acts as the offer and the Agreement module acts as acceptance in a one-to-many dynamic. The Subscription module is also Hats-chained, which means if the contract is terminated because the subscription is not renewed, the Hats-chain is broken.
If any hat in the chain is broken, the entire Hats-chain is broken. So, not only does the Agreement module offer legalese-as-hats in the Hats-chain, the Hats-chain itself offers a legalese dependencies chain-of-title as well!
The Allowlist module hat, the offer, is used as the single gateway for a particular ricard-role.
Though, a ricard-role might have a Hats chain that depends on other ricard-roles, such as how Patron will soon be upgraded to depend on Reader in the Lex.Clinic tree example above.
FMV ReFai
ReFai relies on iterative etymology, from degenerative finance to regenerative finance to AI in finance. ReFai might be the generative, the Fai, I seek in DAOs.
Fair market value “FMV” is one of the more costly technical questions not-for-profits have difficulty answering with accuracy.
What better use of AI than to use it for FMV supply-demand curve equilibrium calculations?
Though not yet integrated with Hats, Nani.ooo gives a glimpse into how a person could do and be compensated for work they perform while wearing a given ricard-role hat.
Given NaniDAO is a DUNA, developing FMV capacity will be a major flywheel unlock.
retroPGF
FMV statements are not exclusive to Nani-chan. We can ask all other AIs to do this for us.
For instance, I asked OpenAI to price the definition I created with OpenAI for the deflat.sovtec.eth meta-category as the last statement in our definition.
If we do this, then retro funding as described at allo.expert can review approved AI statements and pay whichever of them it wills.
Original (Jan 26, 2025).
Edit (Jan 27, 2025):