We went straight back to work after closing our community funding round end March and April has been an exciting month for the OtoCo team!
We’ve added a talented programmer and exceptional designer to our roster to help speed up development and make things beautiful and intuitive.
We also started a major refactoring job for OtoCo that we expect to finish by the end of May.
Finally, we share an update on some UXUI improvements we made that make spin up an LLC from a DAO easier.
A refresher on OtoCo
Everybody knows that OtoCo creates LLCs, but not many people know exactly how we’re able to do that.
Series LLCs can be created by way of a contract, including a smart contract on a blockchain.
This is at the core of how OtoCo generates LLCs—our application fetches legal documents from our file storage and fills in the relevant variables by reading a smart contract that contains:
- The name of the LLC
- Creation date/time of the LLC
- An owner of the LLC
As a result, all LLCs created by OtoCo are essentially smart contracts. You own an LLC by being the owner of the contract.
This works really well, and has for more than 500 users now.
But with new Ethereum standards we see a way to make significant improvements to OtoCo in several important ways.
What’s new under the hood
First, OtoCo will be changing its LLCs from being "ownable" smart contracts to being NFTs according to the ERC-721 standard.
Following this upgrade, when you create an LLC on OtoCo, you will interact with a Master Contract that mints an NFT with the information about your company contained within it.
This Master Contract will be at the heart of OtoCo’s new infrastructure and will fetch information from a second Jurisdiction Contract in order to create NFTs for various entities.
The Jurisdiction Contract can be updated to include new entities and structures without the need to upgrade the Master Contract directly.
This will streamline our development process and make expanding OtoCo’s list of offered entities more efficient.
Additionally, the Master Contract will contain important variables that can be set by OtoCo’s DAO subject to a token holders vote, such as the fee structure for independent developers who build add-ons for our upcoming dAppstore.
Ok, but what do these changes mean for the user…?
Better, faster, stronger
These changes bring serious improvements to the immediate user experience.
It will now be possible to hold your LLC information directly in your wallet and have it visible in Metamask and other wallets. As an NFT, you’ll have a visual representation of your ownership over a company. This helps both as a way to easily verify ownership vis-à-vis third parties and to easily keep track of your entities.
Creating an entity itself will now be faster and cheaper too. This new smart contract infrastructure will enable us to create entities in one transaction. As a result, the gas required will be an estimated 85% lower thanks to the efficiency of the refactored contracts.
Finally, these smart contract changes also bring a new fee structure and the elimination of our requirement to pay 39 DAI to create a new legal entity.
LLCs will be paid for purely in $ETH—the price being 10% of the gas required for the transaction! This means you won’t need to carry ERC-20 tokens or any stablecoins in your wallet. Just the $ETH you already use for gas in all your other applications.
We will be applying the same fee logic to third party plug-ins: On the right side of the diagram above you can see the way third-party plugins are integrated with other smart contracts. Each plugin will have a smart contract that collects the fees from the user, commits an internal transaction to the Master Contract (for fees to OtoCo), and then deploys code for the dapp.
The outcome will be a third-party dapp deployed by a non-upgradeable smart contract which helps mitigate potential exploits.
UXUI Update: Fork in the Road
We’ve seen an increasing number of people attracted to the idea of using a multisig to own and control their LLC. We thought we’d make that process a little easier for them.
We’re updating our entity creation process to include clear actionable steps for users who do not come with an existing Gnosis Safe multi-sig and need to create one.
This entity creation flow will have two paths:
- One for individuals who just need an entity for themselves using their individual wallet (current flow).
- Another for a decentralized team that decides to use their DAO voting protocol or multi-sig wallet to control an LLC as a limited liability wrapper around their project.
The first path will be the choice of for freelancers who need an invoicing entity, core developer units and other blockchain projects where only one Manager of the LLC needs access to the entity’s dashboard as its sole Member.
The second path will be for projects with a decentralized team that needs to collectively control and share access to their entity via the OtoCO dashboard.
When selecting this path by clicking the right hand panel below, users will be directed to Gnosis Safe where they can access OtoCo directly through its apps section.
Users can always change these access permissions by transferring the ownership of their LLC to another wallet (single signer or multisig).
What’s Next?
We believe these updates will bring substantial user experience improvements and make it more intuitive to create entities and access wider OtoCo features going forward.
Looking ahead to the what follows the refactoring job, by popular demand we’ll be implementing a document library with an initial drop of templates for the benefit of OtoCo users.
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