Most cooperative organizations don't own their means of coordination: Stripe owns the payments, Discord owns the decisions, Google owns the membership records. This talk is about how cooperative governance could look on decentralized tech stacks, and explores new governance primitives this enables, such as votes that mix democracy with active participation, membership built through vouching rather than token purchase, and strategies for minimizing governance while maintaining accountability.

Decentralized systems have not solved the problem of eligibility (who can hold what, and who can transfer to whom) without reintroducing a centralized gatekeeper or severely compromising user privacy. This talk presents a general pattern that solves both, combining zkTLS-verified traits from authoritative real-world sources with on-chain enforcement that rejects ineligible transfers before they execute, opening up everything from compliant tokenized securities to privacy-preserving DAO membership.