In today's decentralised landscape, communities face a fundamental challenge: How do we ensure individuals and groups remain aligned, trust one another, and work together toward shared goals?
Traditional governance systems — both on-chain and off-chain — often reduce complex community sentiment to simple yes/no votes, missing the nuanced signals that reflect where people truly stand.
The Challenge
Communities thrive on voluntary participation and open dialogue. Yet this freedom comes with inherent complexities:
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Different opinions and personal interests create friction
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Asymmetric information leads to misalignment
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Traditional voting mechanisms miss subtle but crucial sentiment
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Collective decision-making can stall without proper coordination tools
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Populism favours the loudest voices
Introducing Signals
Signals addresses the Ideation phase of the governance stack. By consolidating knowledge and feedback, the protocol ensures that every community member—regardless of resources—has an opportunity to contribute meaningful proposals that drive collective progress.
How It Works
At its core, Signals enables token holders meeting configured thresholds to propose initiatives. Support for these initiatives comes through a token-locking mechanism, where users can amplify their support by locking up their tokens for a longer period of time.
This design choice enables smaller holders to compete meaningfully with larger holders, creating a more balanced power dynamic. Locked tokens remain in the contract until the initiative is accepted or expired.
Initiatives quantify support using time-based decay, this creates a dynamically ranked system, ensuring that current community sentiment is accurately reflected. A built-in reward system incentivises thoughtful participation, with trustless distribution for accepted initiatives.
The protocol is designed for flexibility and broad adoption. Compatible with any EVM network, communities can deploy their own contract instances with their own configuration including ERC20 token selection, thresholds, and reward settings. This adaptability ensures the protocol can serve diverse community needs.
Real-World Applications
Signals fills a gap that currently exists in many crucial stages of community governance.
In early discussions, it allows communities to test proposal support and avoid putting too much energy into unpopular or unnecessary directions. For community roadmapping, it provides a structured way to gauge interest in new initiatives and plan strategic directions based on actual stakeholder sentiment.
The protocol also enables participants to build a reputation through transparent contributions, and offers rewards for valuable community input. When analysing community sentiment after the fact, a much deeper and more robust view of the data is made possible by the additional dimensions of lockup size and duration, paired with participant reputations and comments.
Here are a few possibilities of what we’re excited about:
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Temperature checks with on-chain discourse and versioning that allow DAOs to iterate on initiatives before a formal governance process begins
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Interoperable governance coordination, communities, councils and smaller groups can fund initiatives with smaller experiments.
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Cross-chain governance coordination, enabling communities spread across multiple networks to align their decision-making and maintain consistent strategic direction.
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Aggregated on-chain reputation-based systems that identify and empower effective leaders and contributors across multiple communities
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On-chain participant data
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On-chain allocation methods, creating direct paths from community ideation to resource allocation
Research and Vision
Signals is more than a governance tool; it is a new primitive for the future of decentralised coordination.
By facilitating and capturing nuanced sentiment on-chain, Signals fosters a more collaborative and (on-chain) data driven ecosystem for DAOs and digital communities.
We field tested our idea and won the Arbitrum CollabTech hackathon and got accepted into the Uniswap Hook Incubator Q1-25.
So what’s next?
Learn more
Talk to Us
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Support Us
As a relatively new project, we failed to make a dent any material impact in the latest Octant round. Please consider locking some GLM to support us and other amazing projects in future rounds.
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Signals is under active development and looking to run pilots with forward thinking organisations*. If you can help or just want to say hi, drop us a line at hello@lighthouse.cx*