Prepared by Monty Bryant, March 2026

Summary

This proposal outlines an initial plan to transition ReFi DAO from an informally governed network into a Collaboration Monster — a self-reinforcing, commons-based coordination structure protected by trademark law and governed through a community charter.

The transition involves:

  1. Registering the ReFi DAO brand as a protected trademark held by a nonprofit foundation
  2. Pooling all shared assets into a commons governed by the network
  3. Establishing a ReFi DAO Charter defining participation, values, and rights
  4. Implementing a copyfair license governing how commons materials are used
  5. Forming a ReFi DAO Council to steward the charter and assets
  6. Transitioning away from founder-dependent coordination toward distributed governance

The initial scope of this Collaboration Monster is the ReFi Local Node Network. Future phases may extend the model to the broader ReFi ecosystem of projects and protocols.

This proposal also recommends exploring Regen Commons as a potential legal and institutional vehicle for hosting this structure, enabling stacking with the emerging Regen Collaboration Monster.

Part 1: What Is a Collaboration Monster?

The Coordination Problem

Across many domains — climate action, regenerative economics, open science, digital infrastructure — mission-driven communities face a recurring structural challenge. People share goals and values, yet remain fragmented. Resources are duplicated. Knowledge stays siloed. Shared assets go ungoverned. And the extractive systems these communities seek to transform continue to consolidate power, because competition remains the default strategy.

Game theorists describe this as a multipolar trap: a situation where individually rational decisions produce collectively harmful outcomes. Everyone would benefit from cooperating, but without binding mechanisms, the dominant strategy is to act alone.

A New Design Pattern

The Collaboration Monster is a design pattern for overcoming these dynamics. Developed by Primavera De Filippi and researchers at the Feÿtopia Extitute of Research (feytopia.com), the concept is still emerging — there are no formal public materials yet — but a week of intensive development workshops in February 2025 significantly advanced the framework. An initial guide is available as a companion PDF: