HR Payroll in Web3 by Envario: Utopia

Twali

3 min readNov 10, 2022

About / Summary

Utopia is a collaborative payroll and expense management platform for DAOs.

Key Takeaways/Quick Facts

Enables DAO companies to pay U.S. Employees in USD or Crypto.
Automates payroll and contributor payment schedules, and routing of self-service expense reimbursement requests.
Platform is in beta currently.

What it Does / Doesn’t Do

Does:

Automates payroll, allowing recurring payments to team members in USD or cryptocurrencies.
Streamlines expense management by empowering contributors to submit expense reimbursement requests for automate routing to eligible approvers.
Tracks past contributions and total compensation for each contributor.
Provides a dashboard with visibility to payroll and financial transactions.
Helps maintain compliance including tax withholdings and end-of-year W2 & 1099 filings for US jurisdictions.

‍Doesn’t:

Offer payments in fiat other than USD.
Offer taxation and pay-related compliance handling for non-US contributors.
Serve as an Employer of Record.
Address employment and HR-related compliance areas outside of payroll and taxation.

What Sets It Apart

Designed for DAOs:

Built specifically to serve DAOs, Utopia’s architecture and features address the challenges that this new breed of organizations face–for example, organizing and paying employees and contributors who do not fall into the familiar structures and patterns of traditional corporations. While upholding and delivering the traditional, battle-tested standards of payroll management and expense reimbursement, Utopia incorporates the custom needs of DAOs such as crypto-based payments and automated workflows for expense approval. This DAO-centered focus instills trust that they will continue to address the unique requirements of web3 as the ecosystem itself evolves.

“Gas-less” Transactions for Operators/Contributors:

Utopia provides the ability to execute payments without requiring payment of associated transaction fees (known as “gas fees” within the context of the Ethereum blockchain) to come from a personal wallet. It does this by batching payment requests for multi-signature approval, and executing the payments with gas fees coming directly from the DAO’s treasury. This streamlines the process for users and consolidates the overall costs for DAOs.

Organization Management:

Utopia enables the organization of contributors into roles and working groups, providing both a structural view of the population of payees, as well as a historical record of each member’s roles, contributions, and total compensation.

Transparent Record-keeping and Financial Reporting

Treasury management and financial reporting will be visible to all members with the release of Utopia’s analytics dashboard which will update in real time. For DAOs that value transparency as a tenet of web3, this will provide a reliable, automated source of record and mechanism for decentralized accountability.