Cap9

“Every program and every privileged user of the system should operate using the least amount of privilege necessary to complete the job.” — Jerome Saltzer, Communications of the ACM The underlying idea of decentralized organizations is the use of blockchain technology to securely manage and track a broad range of predominantly financial interactions without requiring a trusted third party. While this unlocks a huge potential, the development and deployment of such organizations has a high barrier of entry. Smart contract1 development practices and tooling are still in their prenatal stages of maturity, with zero margin for error. Additionally, organizations must be extensible upfront to allow changes and upgrades to their systems while still maintain high standards of safety. Cap9 is a minimal open-source exokernel2 protocol that serves as a building block for establishing secure and scalable organizations. Cap9 enables organizations that will grow in complexity and will require long term extensibility. Using Cap9, users can establish an organization on the blockchain with a much higher level of confidence in its stability and security. The safety model Cap9 provides not only reduces risk, but allows organizations to be designed in a much more flexible and robust manner. The exokernel model of Cap9 allows organizations to freely define their own systems and procedures, but within a safe and controlled environment. The Cap9 kernel provides the building blocks and primitives that organizations need to build more nuanced security and governance models to suit their use case. Most critically, by using the primitives Cap9 provides, designers of these systems will then be able to demonstrate these security guarantees to others without requiring manual-code verification.