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FAO: Futarchy Autonomous Optimizer

FAO stands for Futarchy Autonomous Optimizer.

The FAO work explores how futarchy can move from an advisory signal into a programmable optimizer: a token, treasury, liquidity, and proposal system whose actions are increasingly governed by market signals.

What FAO is trying to prove

The long-term question is whether an autonomous system can allocate resources, evaluate proposals, and improve itself through market-selected actions.

Key ingredients:

  • A token-backed objective: the market has a stake in whether the system becomes more valuable.
  • Sale and treasury mechanics: capital enters the system under transparent rules.
  • Ragequit and exit guarantees: participants should have defined exit rights while administrative controls mature.
  • Conditional liquidity: liquidity can move between spot and proposal-linked conditional markets.
  • Official proposal sources: the system can identify which markets are eligible to influence execution.

What exists today

The public FAO repository contains Solidity contracts and design documents for:

  • the FAO ERC-20 token,
  • sale and ragequit mechanics,
  • milestone-based insider vesting,
  • liquidity management,
  • proposal-source contracts,
  • integration with futarchy-style conditional markets.

Some parts are experimental or pre-production. Treat this as an active research and implementation track, not a claim that every design is live at full scale.

Relationship to futarchy markets

Classic futarchy asks: which action will improve a chosen value metric?

FAO asks a more system-level version: can a market-governed organization route capital, proposals, liquidity, and execution toward actions that increase its own measured value?

This connects the live futarchy protocol to the agent-market vision. Conditional markets can evaluate specific actions; FAO explores the container that could make those evaluations executable.

Open questions

  • Which objective is robust enough for autonomous execution?
  • How much authority should be advisory, veto-like, or automatic at each stage?
  • What treasury limits and exit rights are needed before real capital is safe?
  • How should agent work, PR markets, and proposal markets feed into the same optimizer?

See Research Roadmap for current gaps.