Part I. Our Vision for OtoCo: From Product to Platform

Since launching OtoCo, we've learned a lot from our users and the wider community since we launched OtoCo last summer as an onchain company formation tool. Here's where we want to take it next.

We need containers to hold things, from drink cans and grocery bags to wallets and trusts.

Code is held in repositories. Organizations too can exists just in code, as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations.

Most projects however look for a limited liability shield. Though we believe limited liability is in essence contractual and can hence be smartcontractified, this remains untested.

As a result, the limited liability company is likely to remain the main legal wrapper for most of our economic activity, from starting a venture to pooling capital to holding investments.

For this reason, about a year ago we launched OtoCo, a company formation tool that lets users instantly spin-up a Delaware or Wyoming limited liability company (LLC) using their Ethereum wallet.

OtoCo started more as a hobby, a fork of otonomos.com, but we believe that the idea of putting companies on blockchain may do what shipping containers did for global trade: create pre-assembled, standardized units to stow value of any kind, powered by smart contracts and transportable on a decentralized ledger.

We started with onchain “kits” such as an easy ERC20 token foundry, the ability to add a multi-sig cryptoasset company wallet with an ENS wallet address, onchain encrypted messaging, and more.

OtoCo users can also pay for our services in all major crypto, as well as with card and Apple Pay, via a simple unified checkout.

These new features hint at where OtoCo is going: towards building an automated assembly line for onchain entities that lets you add the components you need for your blockchain project, no matter where you are around the world.

In what follows, we first want to talk about why we started with company formation, to then explain how we plan to transition from product to platform.