MANIFESTO
ZENAOmeansZen Autonomous Organizations
Our mission is to allow humans to organize common projects (physical or online) in a resilient, safe, and transparent way, using radically simple tools.
We believe the world needs powerful, open-source, and decentralized tools to empower humans in their common projects. The time has come to fight back against centralized platforms.
We, the Samouraï Coop crew, commit ourselves to building sustainable tools that help people organize whatever they want, with their friends, families, and communities.
We believe that an event is something that can change life and society. As we are French, we want to remind everyone that the French Revolution started with a very small group of people, discussing, voting, and gradually creating an entire movement for freedom, equality, and fraternity.
Zenao is more than a simple event organization platform. It's designed to let you and your tribe decide together what the future of your community is.
Zenao is a machine for creating DAOs* in a zen spirit, powered bySamourai.worldto build a new CoopNation.
(*Decentralized Autonomous Organizations)
In case of emergency, stay zen and organize.
zenao.io
WHITEPAPER
1. The Vision
Abstract & context: In today's digital world, all of our social interactions are governed and administered by commercial companies that manage centralised platforms on which we are merely consumers.
Zenao aims to gradually build a social and technological experience based on a radically different architecture that is open, modular, interoperable, and transparent.
We believe that users should havesovereigntyin their relationship with the social organisations they found or join, but also in their relationship with the tool itself.
As the Zenao platform and application, the user community will gradually build a layer of governance based on adecentralized organization.
2. The Product
Zenao is a platform centered around communities and designed to progressively evolve toward decentralized governance.
Today, users can participate in, create, or manage a community and its associated events. Ultimately, each community will become autonomous and decentralized, define its own rules, and control its operations. An individual will simply be a member of a community, with a role assigned by that community.
The Zenao application itself follows a path toward decentralization, allowing power users to influence the direction and future roadmap of the platform.
Features — Beta version (live)
- Creation and management of public or private communities & events
- Frictionless digital ticketing (no login required)
- Ticket scanning within the application
- Distributed governance system based on roles
- Discovery of public events
- Social community & events (messages, images, videos, polls, etc.)
- Social profiles enabling users to showcase portfolios
Upcoming Features
- Accept payments (paid events, community subscription thought Stripe payments)
- Accept cryptocurrency payments (Bitcoin, EVM, Stablecoins, etc.)
- Vaults allowing communities to co-manage crypto-funds
- make transactions using a multisig & dao votes
- connect/integration of DAO-vault yield optimization (Morpho)
- DAO Templates for easy and safe organisations configurations
- fitting with simple models (from entrepreneurship to DAOs)
- Connect DAOKit based IAM w/ centralized tools
- ordering centralized services as a DAO
- Private events & ZK-proofs
- allowing private but trustable accounts with zero-knowledge proofs
3. Self-Sovereign Governance Layers & Modularity
3.1 System Actors
Each actor in the system is represented as a DAO:
- User: a DAO with a single member, corresponding to a user account on the platform
- Event: a DAO with multiple members who can distribute roles (participant, gatekeeper, organizer, etc.)
- Community: a DAO composed of many members and events, with roles such as administrator, moderator, member, etc.
- Zenao: the platform itself will become a community of users able to coordinate, self-fund, and co-administer the product through DAO governance
DAOs operate through a role-based permission system, where each role depends on specific governance rules. For example: an event DAO can grant a gatekeeper role to a user to give him the ability to check in tickets at entrance.
3.2 Zenao Architecture & Foundations
Zenao is designed to integrate with programmable blockchain infrastructures.
- Blockchain-agnostic DAOKit built in Golang
- Compatible with any Turing-complete VM (EVM, WASM, etc.)
Zenao integrates a future-proof DAO framework called Daokit, developed in-house and used to represent every entity (community, event, user) as an upgradable DAO.
Each DAO implementation can be updated over time, allowing continuous evolution of governance mechanisms.
4. User Story Example — Hyper Hacktive Festival
As a first experience, the Samouraï Coop team ( builders behindZenao.io) decided to demonstrate the power of Zenao's vision with a concrete use case.
Context: Hyper Hacktive Festival is a short film festival taking place in Paris, produced by the Samouraï Coop crew with a strong “DAO Culture” approach. The concept is to build an engaged and passionate community around films and audiovisual creations in Paris—connecting, encouraging, and supporting the next generation of young directors.
All participants are invited to:
- A community meet-up before the event to connect with others
- The main event in a cinema, screening 8 to 10 short films
- A community after-party
- Vote for films and directors they want the community to support
- Serve as jury members for the next event's film selection
The community is composed of:
- Participants (attendees watching films)
- Filmmakers, technicians, creatives, authors, etc.
- Producers, professionals, etc.
- Partners and sponsors
- Organizers (Samouraï crew)
Tools:
- Community page: gathering all community information
- Events page: focusing on main event details
- Polls and feeds for community discussion and media sharing
As organizer:
- Set up community page and create events
- Send newsletters and emails to community members
- Assign organization roles for staff
- Super-admin (C-level)
- Administration / Treasury Manager / Community Manager / Technicians / Developers
- Community moderators
- Gatekeepers and security officers at the entrance (scanning tickets)
As community member:
- Stay informed about community news and initiatives via email
- Connect and collaborate with other community members
- Create a personal profile and portfolio
- Gain roles based on responsibilities and trust
- Vote on community governance, grant allocations, etc.
As filmmaker, creative, or technician:
- Same benefits as community members
- Use profile as a professional portfolio
- Access community networking and opportunities
- Vote on community governance, grant allocations, etc.
5. Roadmap & Philosophical Position
At this stage of Zenao, we believe the only focus must remain to address users needs. 99% of the population are not interested about decentralization or distributed protocols values. People are just looking for efficient tools, products and simple apps to fit their needs.
We consider that Zenao is made for real-life needs and not “Web3 speculation” narratives. The potential of the dApp is very large, both in term of “market”, as a product, but also in term of adoption for decentralized protocols to be used by main stream people.
We want to spend upcoming phase to make the user experience perfectly fitting with non-tech people, in order to orchestrate an organic, in-real-life,and non-speculative user growth.
Once we’ll reach an important monthly user base, we’ll progressively present our decentralization roadmap and present it to our power-users as a proposal, fitting perfectly with the DAO culture we want to encourage, support and build with and for the Zenao community.
"In case of emergency, stay zen and organize."