PWN is proud to announce the official launch of PWN DAO. At its core, PWN DAO is designed to manage and enhance the PWN Protocol, providing a governance model that balances decentralization with the efficiency of a crypto-native collective. It ensures accountability not just to a community but through it.

Here and now, at the start of the 21st century, traditional finance is being transformed into something faster, trustless, and more inclusive. A global system of value exchange is emerging, powered by digital infrastructure that lets anyone transact anytime, anywhere. We’re not just upgrading legacy assets—we’re creating space for the unique value driven by Millennials, Gen Z, and the rising wave of digital-native innovators.

Welcome to the age of DAOs, open markets, and participatory economies, where everyone can step in as an equal player. With tools like Uniswap and CoW Protocol, anyone can be a marketmaker for any asset and a shareholder of their marketplace at the same time. At PWN, we’re making this vision a reality for DeFi lending. In a world of user-owned products, borrowers and lenders don’t just transact—they align, forming powerful, community-driven credit unions that optimize capital for everyone involved.

PWN DAO is here to make it happen. Our mission? Build and maintain open, permissionless, and immutable financial tools for all. As a global financial collective, we’re not just rewriting the rules—we’re building a system for the cryptonatives that prioritizes freedom, innovation, and long-term value creation, leveraging PWN the universal lending protocol built for the tokenized economy.

1. PWN Protocol Overview

The PWN Protocol facilitates peer-to-peer, non-custodial, fixed-term loans with key features that include:

• Permissionless selection of credit and collateral assets

• Full immutability

• Fixed rates

• Fully customizable risk parameters

  • LTV & Interest

  • Counterparty selection

  • Optional Liquidation engines

• Capital efficient Intents

• Isolated tokenized debt (via ERC721 LOAN tokens).

The protocol further innovates with novel features such as curated copy-lending strategies, pool-like elastic offers, and liquidity hooks with Morpho, Aave, and Compound, with more to come.

2. PWN DAO: Governance Framework

• Dual Optimistic Governance: Balancing Agility and Inclusivity

PWN DAO introduces a dual optimistic governance model:

1. The Collective: Comprising all stakers, the Collective ensures broad participation. Members vote on proposals that shape the protocol, such as parameter adjustments or strategic initiatives. Proposals pass with a 20% quorum and majority support.

2. The Stewards: A smaller, fast-acting group, initially composed of the protocol’s core team, transitions to elected delegates over time. The Stewards address immediate concerns and drive critical updates, with their decisions subject to veto by the Collective to maintain balance.

This approach ensures the DAO can respond quickly to opportunities while remaining inclusive.

• Time-Weighted Voting Power: Rewarding Commitment

Governance power is earned through commitment:

• Stake tokens for durations from 1 year (1x voting weight) to 10 years (3.5x voting weight).

• Voting weight decreases as maturity approaches, ensuring fairness across participants.

This mechanism aligns incentives with the protocol's long-term health.

• Hardcoded Voting Rewards: Incentivizing Engagement

To combat voter apathy, PWN DAO introduces hardcoded incentives:

• Rewards in newly minted PWN tokens for active participation in approved proposals.

• Non-participating stakers may face token inflation, reinforcing governance as a responsibility.

3. Tokens in the PWN DAO Ecosystem

PWN Token: The Backbone

• Stake PWN to unlock governance rights.

• Tokens are staked for varying periods to earn voting power, with longer commitments offering greater influence.

vePWN: The Voting Power

• vePWN represents staked PWN, weighted by lock duration.

• Longer lockups yield higher vePWN (e.g., 10 years = 3.5x voting weight).

• Voting power decreases as the lockup nears its end, reflecting the remaining commitment period.

stPWN: The Staking Representation

• stPWN NFTs represent staked PWN, enabling further composability of the stake with DeFi while ensuring vote commitment

• Allows stakers to unlock liquidity while remaining active in governance.

4. Beyond Governance: PWN DAO's Expanded Role

Protocol Oversight

• Sets borrowing fees, protocol topology, and other adjustable parameters to ensure growth and adaptability.

Treasury Management

• Can act as a lender, allowing for instant liquidity on selected assets, or engages in secondary debt markets to support liquidity flow on the protocol

Ecosystem Expansion

• Supports the development of new loan types, tools, and protocol enhancements.

5. Visualizing PWN DAO

The interconnected components of PWN DAO are enabling to overcome the usual tradeoffs of decentralized governance - levering the power of the crowd and oversight while keeping its flexibility and quick execution on pushing protocol upgrades (without effecting existing markets).

From its token ecosystem to its dual governance model, every aspect of PWN DAO is carefully constructed to balance decentralization, efficiency, and community engagement.

6. A New Standard for DAO Governance

PWN DAO is more than a governance mechanism—it’s a blueprint for crypto-native collectives. By combining thoughtful design with innovation, it sets a new standard for decentralized finance.

Learn more by diving into the PWN DAO Whitepaper.

Acknowledgments: Building with Aragon OSx

We’d like to extend a huge thank you to the team at Aragon for their incredible work on the Aragon OSx framework, which serves as the backbone for PWN DAO's governance architecture.

Aragon OSx provides a robust, modular, and scalable infrastructure that makes deploying and managing DAOs seamless, enabling us to focus on innovating within our governance model. We’re proud to be part of the ecosystem building on such a groundbreaking platform.

To the team at Aragon: we see you, we appreciate you, and we’re excited to continue exploring what’s possible together.

You can access the full whitepaper via the following link.