Vol. I, No. 1 Monday, August 31, 2026 Standards & Methodology
The daily governance brief for DAO tokenholders

Probity Institute

Methodology

What the GSA Standards Measure

The GSA standards (GSA-1 through GSA-8) are a set of named, auditable standards for governance-token rights. Each is a badge a DAO can earn. A GSA badge means: this DAO enforces these specific rights in code. It does not mean "this DAO is well-governed" in a general sense. The GSA badges are mechanical statements about whether a right is contract-enforced — not opinions about the quality or intent of any governance community.

GSA-1 through GSA-8

BadgeStandardWhat it verifiesStatus
GSA-1Sovereign TreasuryToken controls treasury via smart contract, with no multisig gateUnder review
GSA-2Recallable AuthorityToken holders can fire any delegate, operator, or councilUnder review
GSA-3Revenue DistributionProtocol revenue flows to token via a hardcoded contract mechanismUnder review
GSA-4Treasury CovenantProgrammable spend rules the treasury cannot bypassUnder review
GSA-5Information RightsContract-enforced financial disclosure at defined intervalsUnder review
GSA-6On-Chain M&AContract-native mergers without legal wrappersUnder review
GSA-7Sybil-Resistant VotingVoting resists flash-loan, Sybil, and vote-buying attacksProposed
GSA-8Dispute ResolutionOn-chain dispute mechanism with oracle input and token-holder appealProposed
Methodology freeze pending — Per-DAO GSA determinations are not published until the scoring methodology is frozen in version 1.0 and recorded in the revision log below. The table above describes what each standard verifies; it does not yet assign any DAO a pass or fail. This is a deliberate editorial rule: no score judgments are published before the methodology is frozen.

Audit Pipeline

Each standard carries five code-level checks, verified in three stages. The audit is behavioral: it asks whether the contract actually enforces the right, not merely whether it permits it.

  1. Static analysis. Review of contract source and ABI against the checks defined for the standard.
  2. State verification. Direct read of live chain state via view functions to confirm the contract in deployment matches the analyzed source and that the right is active.
  3. Execution test on a fork. The enforcement path is exercised on a forked network to confirm the contract behaves as claimed under a live transaction.
  4. Evidence pack. Each completed audit produces a dated evidence pack: source references, state-read outputs, and fork test results.
  5. Attestation. Pass/fail determinations, once the methodology is frozen, are published as on-chain attestations (see the Attestation Registry) and mirrored here.

Checks are defined per standard in the standards taxonomy. Five checks per standard, three verification stages, one dated evidence pack per audit. The audit does not certify operational quality; it certifies the presence and enforceability of a specified right in code.

Revision Log

The revision log records every change to the methodology. It is empty until the methodology is frozen — and it must never be empty after. The first entry will record the v1.0 freeze.

DateVersionChangeAuthor
No revisions recorded yet — first entry will be the methodology v1.0 freeze.