Aragon Review

What is Aragon?

Aragon is an open-source suite of software and services which enable setting up and running Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Aragon offers a user-friendly interface, templates, and modular customizable apps, which will suit users with no in-depth technical knowledge and claims to be the platform where developers can set up a DAO in five minutes. The network aims to be the solution both for entities running their business inside and out of the decentralized space, which can benefit from the power of blockchain technology. 

Aragon was launched in 2016, created and developed by the Aragon Association, a non-profit Swiss-based entity that is governed by Aragon Network ANT token holders. As of now, Aragon Association is responsible for allocating and maintaining funds collected through token sales. 

The Aragon Network’s DAO was established by the Aragon Association after a public vote of ANT holders in October 2021 and is intended to replace the Aragon Association in the future. 

How does Aragon work?

Aragon Network offers the following four key products: Aragon Client, Aragon Govern, Aragon Court, and Aragon Voice.

Aragon Client provides DAO templates that can be customized with various functionalities. Templates are sets of pre-configured smart contracts with different features to suit the specific needs of the organizations. This product fits both developers and beginners with no blockchain background.  The service is available on Ethereum, Polygon, and Harmony blockchains.

Those users who have enough programming expertise may deploy a DAO through TaragonCLI (Command Line Interface) or through Aragon Connect, a developer toolkit. 

Aragon offers all the functionalities necessary for maintaining and creating DAOs, including built-in features like voting, tokens, payments, fundraising, accounts payable and receivable, etc. 

The DAOs built on Aragon are secured through the Aragon Court. Aragon Court is a decentralized digital jurisdiction and arbitration mechanism that handles subjective disputes. Aragon Court can be accessed by any decentralized application to arbitrate disputes arising within their DAOs that cannot be resolved by smart contracts. These processes are handled by a set of guardians enrolled for each dispute resolution. Guardians are randomly selected from the pool of activated participants. 

Users wishing to be considered for the role of Guardians have to stake at least 100 ANT tokens. The staked assets are then locked until the dispute is finalized. The more tokens a guardian has staked, the higher the chance of getting drafted. Guardians are expected to perform such tasks as reviewing arguments for a dispute and casting a vote while earning rewards for their efforts, meanwhile, those who fail to complete the required tasks will have their staked tokens slashed. Aragon deploys a voting principle referred to as “plurality”, under which jurors are incentivized to make the majority judgment as incorrect or minority jurors lose their stake.

Aragon Govern is the alternative method of creating a DAO on Aragon Network, which makes use of the optimistic governance or so-called “lazy consensus,” which means that all actions within a DAO are predominantly legitimate unless challenged in Aragon Court. DAOs deployed with Aragon Govern are built on written, subjective agreements between all participating members. Aragon Govern is still in the Beta stage. 

Aragon Voice is another recently introduced feature, which is still in Beta. Aragon Voice is the proposal and voting system that does not require paying gas fees. With this feature, any ERC-20 token holder can create proposals and vote on them. 

How to use Aragon?

Aragon UI is user-friendly and can be digested even by those with no previous blockchain or programming experience as most of all important features and functionalities come standard.  

For setting up a DAO, a user needs to click on “Aragon Client” and connect a wallet. Aragon wallet support includes Metamask, Frame, Ledger, Trezor, Trust wallet, and others. It is required to have at least 0.2 ETH to cover the gas fee (or 0.2 MATIC, ONE, METIS, etc.) or more depending on the network traffic to create a DAO. 

Once connected, the user will need to select a template to set up a DAO. Users may also choose to create their own template. 

There are three types of templates to choose from: Company, this solution will suit those organizations which use transferable tokens and token-weighted voting. Membership template will be the right choice for organizations planning to use non-transferable tokens and deploy one-member-one-vote governance. Reputation template will be convenient for entities planning on using non-transferable tokens and building the decision-making process using reputation-weighted voting. A complete step-by-step guide can be found here.

The Aragon Court Dashboard is the place where all dispute-related tools are available for guardians and those wishing to be drafted as guardians. It also contains detailed information about past and current disputes, including arguments, rulings, timelines, and so forth. Detailed tutorials on how to use Aragon Court can be found here.

The ANT token

ANT is Aragon’s native governance token, which enables its holders to make proposals and vote under Aragon DAO, as well as for dispute resolution in Aragon Court. 

The ANT token was launched in May 2017 through an ICO raising $25 million in just 15 minutes. 

The total supply of ANT was 39.6 million which were allocated as follows: 70% - for the token sale, 15% for Aragon Foundation, and 15% for early contributors and founders. 

Is Aragon safe?

Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo are two founders of the Aragon network and further of the Aragon Association. The network was named after the region in Spain. Luis is claimed to have extensive programming experience, starting at the age of 12 years old. When he was 16 years old, he served as the technical advisor to the vice president of the European Commission, and by the time he turned 18, he managed to launch several startups and was awarded the title of Best Programmer in Europe by HackFWD. Luis and Jorge got acquainted through Twitter, the acquaintance further grew into close collaboration and the birth of the common project. The full list of Aragon team members can be found here.

Aragon advisory board includes Tim Draper, a venture capitalist known for backing innovative companies like Tesla, SpaceX, Coinbase, and Baidu, as well as Brayton Williams, who is the co-founder of BoostVC; he is also an advisor to other projects like MyCrypto, Etherscan, and Keep Network.

Partners 

Aragon claims to accumulate over 900 million in the value stored across 15,000 DAO, more than 1,900 organizations are built on Aragon and it is used by projects including, API3, PieDAO, Aavegotchi, Badger DAO, Curve Finance, Decentraland, PoolTogether with a total project market cap of over $3 billion USD. The full list of projects supported by the Aragon network can be found here.

What’s next?

Aragon network has not made its 2022 roadmap publicly available. 

Links

https://documentation.aragon.org/faq/miscellaneous/is-aragon-open-source

https://forum.aragon.org/