Argot Collective: Building Blockchain Without Bosses

The Argot Collective exists at the intersection of technical excellence and organizational experimentation. Their groundbreaking work focuses on building programming languages and verification tools for the Ethereum ecosystem. They create the virtual infrastructure for people to build applications on the blockchain. The story of how this group makes decisions together is just as interesting as what they're building.

When a group of researchers and developers decided to spin out from the Ethereum Foundation, they weren't just starting another tech company. They were attempting something a bit different: a team with no leadership hierarchy, where every consequential decision would be made through a consent-based process rather than a top-down command.

"Everyone recognized that would be challenging," Sean Billig, one of Argot Collective's founding members, recalls. "It's a large group with different perspectives and different values. I wouldn't have it any other way."

Ready for the Challenge

As the Ethereum Foundation evolved, some teams came to believe that major decisions could and should be made collectively. Rather than struggle over structural conflict, one group decided to create an alternative. An entity where there genuinely was no executive team.

In this new entity, sunsetting a project or changing direction would require the whole group to consent. The Ethereum Foundation supported the transition, provided funding, and helped with legal structure. The Argot Collective was grateful to have that support and strong start.

In practice, wanting a flat structure and operating one are different challenges entirely.

Finding the Right Tool for the Collective

Sean had known about Loomio for years through the Scuttlebutt community. He'd read the Enspiral handbook and studied Alanna Irving's work on collaborative practices in Better Work Together. When it came time to figure out how Argot would actually make decisions, Loomio was almost predetermined.

"It was created by people living in the collective mindset we were hoping to embody," Sean explains.

They started with a private deployment to test it out. Once they confirmed it worked for their needs, a developer helped them migrate to official Loomio hosting. They've been using it for 18 months now, refining their processes as they go.

Anja Petkovic Komel, a mathematician who joined Argot to work on formal verification, inherited Loomio and its culture when she arrived. She hadn't used anything like it before. "I loved it from the start," she says. "You have a platform to express your opinion asynchronously. It enables everybody from every time zone to contribute. I can confirm that all of our 'official' decisions as a collective nowadays are Loomio decisions."

One of Argot's first official acts was to enshrine this decision in their Articles of Association. Loomio decisions count as legally binding. It's their system of record.

The Weight of "Official" Decisions

That official status creates interesting dynamics. Because Loomio is where binding decisions happen, enshrined in legal documents, there's a certain gravity to it. People take the wording of proposals seriously. Colleagues spent time structuring their thoughts for the record.

"Being recorded makes me take more time and structure my thoughts more clearly," Anja notes. "For me, this is a good thing."

But that same gravity can make people hesitant. Sean notices that discussions often start in their chats instead of Loomio. Something that begins as a quick question can sometimes evolve into a lengthy discussion about merits and trade-offs. Because the chat feels less formal, less official, people stay in chat rather than moving to Loomio where the conversation would be threaded, searchable, and preserved.

"There's this feeling of ephemerality," Sean observes. "People are comfortable having private face-to-face conversations about things they wouldn't put in chat. They're comfortable chatting about things they don't feel comfortable putting on Loomio."

The "block" function in the Loomio tool carries similar weight. Blocking a proposal feels serious, as if you are rejecting someone's carefully considered work. That can create a slow down - but also has a positive effect. "It gives us a sense of security," Anja explains. "Saying it out loud gives you this feeling of safety: that we have the option of expressing disagreement and finding a different solution."

The "blocking" of a proposal rarely happens. But knowing it could happen matters. It gives the team members a direct way to express their intent.

Learning in Real Time

Argot Collective has been officially operating as their own entity for under a year. Prior to that, they worked for months getting through the hard questions about structure, salary, and how to make consent-based decision-making work at their scale.

They've created decision types based on Enspiral's model: sense checks, standard decisions, significant decisions, quorum decisions. They've set up templates with engagement requirements. In order for a standard decision to pass, they need 50% of the contributors to vote yes, and there can be no blocks on the decision proposal. Recent feature upgrades in Loomio let them encode these rules directly into proposals.

The collective is still figuring out communication norms. What level of idea is appropriate to create a Loomio thread versus staying in a work chat? When should someone raise a formal proposal versus just testing the waters? The group hasn't yet had a truly contentious issue. They're still in a learning phase.

"We're a bit isolated from typical organizational stressors," Sean offers. "We have runway. We don't have a profit incentive. We're doing open source work, hoping grants will cover it all." These conditions give them a rare space to experiment.

As they've grown to a team of 28 people, some in Berlin together, others scattered around Asia, Europe, and the U.S., maintaining relationships gets harder. "I think if we're going to survive as an organization, it's going to be because of strong interpersonal relationships," Sean says. The group designs and attends off-sites twice a year specifically to build those bonds.

Advice for Collectives

Anja is honest about the skepticism she encounters. "My family asks: who makes sure you do your work? Who is the boss? There has to be somebody who makes a decision." The general expectation is that someone needs to be the final authority.

But her experience at Argot proves otherwise. "We still manage to have the difficult conversations. We don't avoid them just because we don't have a boss to decide. Because we all feel responsible for the decisions being made, we begin the conversations sooner. This general expectation that somebody needs to have the final word hasn't yet turned out to be the case here."

Sean's advice is parallel: "The most important thing is personal relationships. Trying to build mutual understanding about where people are coming from, being open about what we're feeling. As we get bigger, that can become more difficult." Organizations and teams who want to operate effectively in this new way have to make the commitment to doing the interpersonal work and community care.

As 2026 dawns, Argot is thriving. They're building and evolving critical infrastructure for Ethereum. They are experimenting with new projects. And at the same time, they're proving that 28 technical people can make decisions together without a hierarchy. Through a combination of transparent conversations, intentional culture-building and the right tooling to support their decision-making process.

"I'm very optimistic," Anja says with a smile. "I hope we're not going to get proven wrong."

Read Argot's manifesto here.

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