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Medium Blog

You and your friend have an idea for a video game. You are a creative writer and she is an engineer. The two of you can build most of it, but you will need an illustrator and a sound engineer. You hope the project will earn some money on one of the myriad gaming marketplaces.

**But there is a problem.** Sharing ownership and control of this project is difficult to do without registering a company, applying for a business bank account, and negotiating contracts.

**We built Cooperativ to fix this.** It’s a platform that combines blockchain technology with simple, enforceable legal contracts to help creators and entrepreneurs set up and share a business or project, without lawyers or incorporation, in about 30 minutes.

1. Create a project on our platform.
2. Configure revenue share tokens for you and your co-creators, then create a class of [Contributor Credits](https://medium.com/cooperativ/a-new-way-to-compensate-contributors-to-early-stage-projects-fa7d83985fde) to promise your contributors future payment.
3. Invite your collaborators. The invitations are designed to clearly describe the relationship and intellectual property ownership based on permissions you set for each member.

### Why is this a big deal?
> The average person starts a business to sell things, not to experiment with decentralized governance.

From the perspective of our early customers, Cooperativ is a solution to an immediate problem: How to share ownership of a business and trade “real world assets” efficiently and transparently. Strategically, however, it’s a way to get traditional (non-crypto) businesses to tokenize obligations, revenue streams, and assets, setting our company up to become the bridge between the crypto world and the mainstream economy.

If we are successful, Cooperativ will become the default place for people to form, govern, and finance businesses. By abstracting legal procedures relating to incorporation, governance, and investment into a unified experience built on open protocols, we can make it possible for anyone with a computer to form organizations with a wide range of structures, stakeholders, and funding sources. Our customers will start organizations across national borders, form worker-owned cooperatives, and share corporations with stakeholders. They will raise funding from their customers, issue share tokens into exchanges, put digital assets up as collateral, stream payments to lenders, and resolve disputes with partners all within our platform. 

**It's a creator-economy experience for businesses at corporate scale.**

We are currently raising our pre-seed round on a SAFE. Our goal is to develop a beta version of our platform for forming organizations and paying contributors. 

Business formation for the Ownership Economy: Removing all the legal and administrative friction from starting, governing, and financing a business.

Cooperativ Labs is building infrastructure to make it much easier for people to start, finance, and govern businesses by taking common legal and administrative procedures and turning them into programs. Our goal is to build tools that work for everyone on top of blockchain infrastructure.

We plan to deploy this technology not only for own platform Cooperativ.io, but as an offering that will let other companies build markets into their products.

### Taking a hybrid approach
Using traditional legal contracts to create an enforceable space for smart contracts will make blockchain tools more accessible and more useful to a wide range of businesses. Our first tool, [Contributor Credits](https://cooperativ.medium.com/a-new-way-to-compensate-contributors-to-early-stage-projects-fa7d83985fde), offers a simple example of how this hybrid approach works in practice. Contributor Credits let the issuer promise a portion of future income without offering equity. We anchor this tool in a traditional legal contract that fiat courts must enforce, then use blockchain to make the distribution and payment process dramatically simpler. 

### Some of our projects include
* integrating an investor vetting process with a private crypto exchange for real estate assets. This will let our real estate partner dramatically expand the number of investors and syndicators it can server, while operating within the current regulatory regime.
* exploring how corporations can use Contributor Credits to give employees significant financial stake in internal startups and other projects. 
* developing a token facilitates revenue sharing, allowing a wider range of companies to offer meaningful “tokenomics”. 
 
### We need help
* building smart contracts that, combined with our interface, allow the user to create a private (permissioned) exchange. 
* developing tokens that can represent “real world assets” in a compliant manner.
* creating NFTs that represent ownership and control of real legal business entities.
* combining custom smart contracts with existing tooling to efficiently direct payment flows.
* experimenting with ways of making wallets accessible to users via a standard Web2 interface.

### Techstack
* Our current contracts are in Solidity, but we’d like to experiment with Reach.
* We currently only support EVM chains, but we are investigating Algorand for a number of use-cases.

### Current Work
* [The fully-functioning Contributor Credits Alpha](https://contributorcredits.com/)
* [The CC Smart Contract Github repository](https://github.com/sunshine-labs/cc-smart-contract)
* [A detailed Medium post explaining what Contributor Credits are and how they work](https://cooperativ.medium.com/a-new-way-to-compensate-contributors-to-early-stage-projects-fa7d83985fde)

Blockchain Engineer

We expect the main growth channel for our products to be existing communities, particularly those focused on entrepreneurship and artistic creation (particularly game development). We need someone to identify these communities, understand their needs, and introduce Cooperativ. 

### Community Discovery
Find communities and understand how their members form collaborations. Primary targets include Reddit, Discord channels, Slack channels, and co-working spaces. 

### Onboarding & Profile Creation
We "do things that don't scale." Part of this is working closely with each Cooperativ project to help them make the most compelling profiles. Doing this manually at first will help us more deeply understand what makes a profile effective. We can take those learnings and build them into a more automated process.

We therefore want someone who will take over some of the responsibility for getting profiles set up and helping Cooperativs promote them. It would be great to work with someone who will come up with creative ideas for improving the design of the profiles.

### Corporate Partnerships
Many large companies have innovation departments and "intrepreneurship" programs. It's also common for them to create startups internally as a way to create new markets for their main offering. We companies could use Cooperativ projects and Contributor Credits to reduce the risk of creating these internal startups and to give employees and external contributors a greater share of the success. 

This not only provides Sunshine with high-value customers, but it also creates a richer offering of Cooperativs. Contributors could potentially earn a living wage or "stipend" from such projects and then earn multiples of their normal income if and when those projects are successful. 

If our assumptions are correct, this could form a new type of lower-risk entrepreneurship, that could help increase the participation of people who can't afford the risk of traditional entrepreneurship.

Community Builder

Sunshine labs is building infrastructure to make it much easier for people to do business, while limiting the need for traditional contracts. We need help improving and expanding our Cooperativ.io platform.

### What we need
Cooperativ is currently a functioning Alpha, but it’s difficult to use and the code could most likely be improved. We need someone who can take responsibility for planning and developing improvements and new features along side Sunshine Labs’ creator and perhaps one or two other part-time developers.

The first order of business is a handful of small features that will make Cooperativ easier to use. 

### Major new feature
Cooperativ lets users create projects, then invite other collaborators to this projects using invitations that contain basic legal agreements. Currently, project creators can find and add existing users to projects, but there is no invitation/agreement process at all. We need help building a process by which the creator configures terms and compensation, then sends to the contributor a link where he or she can review and sign the agreement. Doing so should automatically add the contributor to the project, and the agreement should be available for both parties to see in their accounts.

Webapp Developer

Cooperativ

Software Engineering

Blockchain

Community Management

Nate Joins Sunshine Labs

Software Engineer

Primary Wallet

David Joins Sunshine Labs

Python/Javascript Developer

Gabby Joins Sunshine Labs

Designer

Jacob Chase-Lubitz creates project: Sunshine Labs

Obligated to fully fund the smart contract when the business reaches $2,000,000 in funding

Early Contributors

 By establishing the C2 Contract with the hash of this Agreement, the Agreement goes into effect and `Sunshine Labs` agrees to the following:  ### Definitions:  - **"`Sunshine Labs`"** means `Sunshine Labs Inc., a corporation organized under the laws of the State of Delaware, United States of America`.  - **"C2 Contract"** means the smart contract located at   ``0xB454EB8bf052efeAA949f9965C6Ee8Fb4f5034eD`` on `the Ethereum Blockchain`.  - **"Contributor Credits"** means the ERC token managed by the C2 Contract  - **"`DAI`"** means the ERC token managed by the smart contract located at   ``0x6b175474e89094c44da98b954eedeac495271d0f`` on `the Ethereum Blockchain`.  - **"Person"** means any natural person, corporation, limited liability company,   trust, joint venture, association, company, partnership, Governmental Authority   or other entity.  - **"Affiliate"** means any Person or entity now or hereafter in control, controlled   by or in common control with `Sunshine Labs`. It shall also include any direct or   indirect subsidiary of `Sunshine Labs` and any company in which `Sunshine Labs` has more than a   ten percent (10%) ownership interest.  - **"Independent Party"** means one or more a third Persons that do not collectively   constitute Affiliates of `Sunshine Labs`.  ### Terms:  The occurrence of any of the following shall constitute a “Trigger Event”:  1. the closing of one or more equity financings of the sale of shares of    `Sunshine Labs` capital stock to an investor or investors with gross proceeds to    `Sunshine Labs` of at least `2,000,000` `USD` or equivalent    (this expressly does not include the conversion of any    convertible debt of `Sunshine Labs`) (an “Equity Financing”);  2. `Sunshine Labs` reaching revenue, determined in accordance with GAAP,    equal to or exceeding `700,000` `USD` or equivalent for the twelve (12) month period    immediately preceding any date of determination (the "Trailing Revenue    Threshold"); or  3. the execution of a transaction or series of transactions (a "Sale"), with    an Independent Party, pursuant to which such Independent Party acquires    - (a) all of the outstanding Equity Securities of `Sunshine Labs`,    - (b) all or substantially all of the assets of `Sunshine Labs` and its Subsidiaries, or    - (c) Equity Securities of `Sunshine Labs` authorized and issued, and possessing the      power to elect or appoint a majority of the Board of Directors (or any similar      governing body of any surviving or resulting Person).  Upon the earliest occurrence of any Trigger Event, `Sunshine Labs` shall make a payment or payments of `DAI` to the C2 Contract such that calling the function 'isFunded' on the C2 Contract returns 'true'.  Exceptions:  1. In the event that the Trigger Event is the Trailing Revenue Threshold being reached, `Sunshine Labs` may delay payment until the earlier of (a) eighteen (18) months from the Trigger Event, or (b) the occurrence of another Trigger Event. 2. In the event that the Trigger event is a Sale, `Sunshine Labs` in no event shall be obligated to make a payment or payments of `DAI` in excess of the net proceeds of the Sale.  In the event that no Trigger Event occurs, `Sunshine Labs` shall have no obligation to make any payment to the C2 Contract, or provide any other compensation to holders of Contributor Credits generated by the C2 Contract.  I, `Jacob Chase-Lubitz`, certify that I have authority to sign on behalf of and legally bind `Sunshine Labs`.

Early Contributors CC Agreement Text

Jake lends money to Sunshine Labs Sunshine Labs

Test establish

**THIS AGREEMENT IS FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY AND SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NULL
AND VOID**


By establishing the Contributor Credit Contract with the hash of this Agreement, the
Agreement goes into effect and `Sunshine Labs` agrees to the following:

### Definitions:

- **"`Sunshine Labs`"** means `Sunshine Labs Inc.`.


- **"Contributor Credit Contract"** means the smart contract located at
  ``0xc5546ac437FEfd16a6D7B92AAEd773d5c81e4213`` on `Ethereum`.

- **"Contributor Credits"** means the ERC token managed by the Contributor Credit Contract

- **"`USDC*`"** means the ERC token managed by the smart contract located at
  ```0x8C035e5adD07e9297fc835604DAb380dCE874acE``` on `Ethereum`.

- **"Person"** means any natural person, corporation, limited liability company,
  trust, joint venture, association, company, partnership, Governmental Authority
  or other entity.

- **"Affiliate"** means any Person or entity now or hereafter in control, controlled
  by or in common control with `Sunshine Labs`. It shall also include any direct or
  indirect subsidiary of `Sunshine Labs` and any company in which `Sunshine Labs` has more than a
  ten percent (10%) ownership interest.

- **"Independent Party"** means one or more a third Persons that do not collectively
  constitute Affiliates of `Sunshine Labs`.

### Terms:
`Test`

I, `Test`, holding email address `jake@sunshinelabs.io`, certify that I have authority to sign on behalf of and
legally bind `Sunshine Labs`.

Test establish - Contributor Credit Agreement

Early Contributors - Polygon


By establishing the Contributor Credit Contract with the hash of this Agreement, the
Agreement goes into effect and `Sunshine Labs` agrees to the following:

### Definitions:

- **"`Sunshine Labs`"** means `Sunshine Labs Inc.`.


- **"Contributor Credit Contract"** means the smart contract located at
  ``0xcD327b874a564534AFA94045eb3BC732BD54A1A9`` on `Polygon`.

- **"Contributor Credits"** means the ERC token managed by the Contributor Credit Contract

- **"Revenue"** means revenue in accordance with GAAP and excluding commission fees imposed by a distribution platform or platforms including, but not limited to, app stores, game marketplaces, and crowdfunding platforms.

- **"`Matic DAI`"** means the ERC token managed by the smart contract located at
  ``0x8f3Cf7ad23Cd3CaDbD9735AFf958023239c6A063`` on `Polygon`.

- **"Person"** means any natural person, corporation, limited liability company,
  trust, joint venture, association, company, partnership, Governmental Authority
  or other entity.

- **"Affiliate"** means any Person or entity now or hereafter in control, controlled
  by or in common control with `Sunshine Labs`. It shall also include any direct or
  indirect subsidiary of `Sunshine Labs` and any company in which `Sunshine Labs` has more than a
  ten percent (10%) ownership interest.

- **"Independent Party"** means one or more third Persons that do not collectively
  constitute Affiliates of `Sunshine Labs`.

### Terms:

The occurrence of any of the following shall constitute a “Trigger Event”:

1. the closing of one or more sales of shares of
   `Sunshine Labs` capital stock to an investor or investors with gross proceeds to
   `Sunshine Labs` of at least `2,000,000` `USD` or equivalent (a "Financing”);

2. `Sunshine Labs` reaching Revenue equal to or exceeding `700,000` `USD` or equivalent during the 12 month period
   immediately preceding any date of determination (the "Trailing Revenue
   Threshold"); or

3. the execution of a transaction or series of transactions (a "Sale"), with
   an Independent Party, pursuant to which such Independent Party acquires
   - (a) all of the outstanding Equity Securities of `Sunshine Labs`,
   - (b) all or substantially all of the assets of `Sunshine Labs` and its Subsidiaries, or
   - (c) Equity Securities of `Sunshine Labs` authorized and issued, and possessing the
     power to elect or appoint a majority of the Board of Directors (or any similar
     governing body of any surviving or resulting Person).

Upon the earliest occurrence of any Trigger Event, `Sunshine Labs` shall make a payment or payments of `Matic DAI` to the C2 Contract such that calling the function 'isFunded' on the C2 Contract returns 'true'.

Exceptions:

1. In the event that the Trigger Event is the Trailing Revenue Threshold being reached, `Sunshine Labs` may delay payment until the earlier of (a) 6 months from the Trigger Event, or (b) the occurrence of another Trigger Event.
2. In the event that the Trigger event is a Sale, `Sunshine Labs` in no event shall be obligated to make a payment or payments of `Matic DAI` in excess of the net proceeds of the Sale.

In the event that no Trigger Event occurs, `Sunshine Labs` shall have no obligation to
make any payment to the C2 Contract, or provide any other compensation to
holders of Contributor Credits generated by the C2 Contract.

I, `Jacob Chase-Lubitz`, holding email address `jake@sunshinelabs.io`, certify that I have authority to sign on behalf of and
legally bind `Sunshine Labs`.

Early Contributors - Polygon - Contributor Credit Agreement

Legal Contributors

**THIS AGREEMENT IS FOR TESTING PURPOSES ONLY AND SHOULD BE CONSIDERED NULL
AND VOID**


By establishing the Contributor Credit Contract with the hash of this Agreement, the
Agreement goes into effect and `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` agrees to the following:

### Definitions:

- **"`Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)`"** means `Sunshine Labs Inc.`.


- **"Contributor Credit Contract"** means the smart contract located at
  ``0x6226142531094A54ED3e55C5cAD378E6A367d676`` on `Ropsten`.

- **"Contributor Credits"** means the ERC token managed by the Contributor Credit Contract

- **"Revenue"** means revenue in accordance with GAAP and excluding commission fees imposed by a distribution platform or platforms including, but not limited to, app stores, game marketplaces, and crowdfunding platforms.

- **"`USDC*`"** means the ERC token managed by the smart contract located at
  ``0x8C035e5adD07e9297fc835604DAb380dCE874acE`` on `Ropsten`.

- **"Person"** means any natural person, corporation, limited liability company,
  trust, joint venture, association, company, partnership, Governmental Authority
  or other entity.

- **"Affiliate"** means any Person or entity now or hereafter in control, controlled
  by or in common control with `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)`. It shall also include any direct or
  indirect subsidiary of `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` and any company in which `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` has more than a
  ten percent (10%) ownership interest.

- **"Independent Party"** means one or more third Persons that do not collectively
  constitute Affiliates of `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)`.

### Terms:

The occurrence of any of the following shall constitute a “Trigger Event”:

1. the closing of one or more sales of shares of
   `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` capital stock to an investor or investors with gross proceeds to
   `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` of at least `10,000,000` `USD` or equivalent (a "Financing”);

2. `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` reaching Revenue equal to or exceeding `7,000,000` `USD` or equivalent during the 12 month period
   immediately preceding any date of determination (the "Trailing Revenue
   Threshold"); or

3. the execution of a transaction or series of transactions (a "Sale"), with
   an Independent Party, pursuant to which such Independent Party acquires
   - (a) all of the outstanding Equity Securities of `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)`,
   - (b) all or substantially all of the assets of `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` and its Subsidiaries, or
   - (c) Equity Securities of `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` authorized and issued, and possessing the
     power to elect or appoint a majority of the Board of Directors (or any similar
     governing body of any surviving or resulting Person).

Upon the earliest occurrence of any Trigger Event, `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` shall make a payment or payments of `USDC*` to the C2 Contract such that calling the function 'isFunded' on the C2 Contract returns 'true'.

Exceptions:

1. In the event that the Trigger Event is the Trailing Revenue Threshold being reached, `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` may delay payment until the earlier of (a) 6 months from the Trigger Event, or (b) the occurrence of another Trigger Event.
2. In the event that the Trigger event is a Sale, `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` in no event shall be obligated to make a payment or payments of `USDC*` in excess of the net proceeds of the Sale.

In the event that no Trigger Event occurs, `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)` shall have no obligation to
make any payment to the C2 Contract, or provide any other compensation to
holders of Contributor Credits generated by the C2 Contract.

I, `Jacob Chase-Lubitz`, holding email address `jake@sunshinelabs.io`, certify that I have authority to sign on behalf of and
legally bind `Cooperativ (Sunshine Labs)`.

Cooperativ

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