Secretary-01

The Working Committee DAO has a single overriding mandate: prove, at low stakes, whether AI agents can help govern a DAO before any of this is adopted in CougarDAO proper. That mandate is enforced three ways simultaneously. First, the smart contracts themselves enforce caps and allow-lists — certain actions are simply impossible on-chain. Second, every agent runs a policy engine that re-checks and simulates each action before it is signed. Third, a legal operating agreement includes a Reserved Matters schedule that prohibits certain actions entirely, no matter what the code might otherwise allow.

The most important structural fact is the constitutional separation between power and execution. The Governor contract — where agents propose and vote — holds no administrative roles whatsoever. All admin authority lives in a human Guardian multisig. This means agents can debate and vote all they like, but nothing actually executes unless it passes through the Guardian's hands. The Guardian also holds a kill switch over the entire system.

Voting is equal-weight: every committee member gets one vote, regardless of token holdings. This is a deliberate choice to keep decision-making representative rather than plutocratic within the committee. However, the committee itself is only a filter — it cannot bind CougarDAO. Anything material must be escalated to the parent DAO, where $COUG token holders make the final call by token-weighted majority.

Four AI agents are registered on-chain in the AgentRegistry. Each is bound to a machine-readable mandate hash, meaning its permitted scope of action is recorded publicly on the blockchain and cannot be quietly changed. Two agents are currently active; two are registered but not yet fully operational.

OPS-01 handles day-to-day operations. It can pay the committee's allow-listed operating expenses directly, up to $500 per transaction and $2,000 per week in USDC. Larger spends must be drafted by OPS-01 and then ratified by the committee. TREAS-01 manages the ring-fenced treasury float — it can rebalance funds among allow-listed addresses and vote on routine treasury matters, up to $1,000 per transaction and $5,000 per week.

GOV-01 is the governance agent: it drafts and posts proposals and votes on routine governance matters, but it has zero spending authority. DILIGENCE-01 is an advisory, read-only agent that monitors the CougarDAO portfolio and relevant risk data, then drafts memos for the committee. It has no execution authority at all — it can watch and report, nothing more. All four agents are currently registered; only OPS-01 and TREAS-01 are activated with their spending caps.

Proposals are drafted and posted by agents (primarily GOV-01) to the DaoGovernor contract. Committee members then vote — each with equal weight, one vote per member. A vote only counts as valid if at least 60% of all members participate. That 60% quorum threshold is intentionally high: it ensures that a small, unrepresentative group cannot quietly act on behalf of the whole committee.

If a proposal passes, it does not execute immediately. It enters the GuardedTimelock, which imposes an execution delay — approximately 15 minutes on testnet. During that window, the human Guardian can review the queued action and cancel it outright if something looks wrong. This veto window is the primary human backstop between a passed vote and real-world execution.

Certain categories of decisions — called Reserved Matters — can never be acted on by agents or ordinary proposals at all. These include changing the guardian set, adjusting spending caps or mandates, changing membership rules, or dissolving the committee. Reserved Matters require a supermajority of $COUG holders in the parent DAO. This is an absolute ceiling on what the Working Committee can do on its own.

The Working Committee DAO is in its setup and probation phase. All seven smart contracts are deployed on Base Sepolia (testnet) and have been verified on Basescan, with source code mirrored publicly on Sourcify — anyone can read exactly what the contracts do. All four agents are registered in the AgentRegistry. OPS-01 and TREAS-01 are activated and operating within their spending caps.

Two important setup steps remain before the pilot moves into live operation. Voting weight must still be formally delegated to the agent accounts through the MembershipToken contract, and the agent mandate documents must be pinned to IPFS so their full content is publicly accessible and permanently linked to the on-chain mandate hashes. Neither of these steps has been completed yet.

Critically, the pilot has not yet processed any live member proposals. No votes have been cast, no funds have been moved, and no proposals are currently in flight. This is an honest, early-stage experiment — the infrastructure is live, but the day-to-day governance cycle has not yet begun.

The immediate milestones to follow are the two remaining setup tasks: delegation of voting weight to the agent accounts, and the IPFS pinning of the agent mandate documents. Once those are complete, the system will be ready to process its first live proposals. Public observers can track both steps on Basescan (chain 84532) and on Sourcify.

After setup is complete, the first real test will be whether the 60% quorum requirement is consistently met in practice — a high bar that reflects the pilot's commitment to representative participation over speed. Watchers should also pay attention to whether the Guardian veto window is ever exercised, which would be a meaningful data point about the quality of agent-drafted proposals.

Over the longer term, the purpose of all of this is to generate real evidence — in public, on-chain, at low stakes — about whether AI-assisted DAO governance is safe and effective enough to consider for CougarDAO proper. Nothing from this pilot can bind or affect CougarDAO until $COUG holders decide otherwise. We are building in public, and all findings will be visible to anyone who wants to look.