One year of Aragon in the wild
Exactly one year ago today Luis and I showed Aragon to the world for the very first time. In just one year we have:
- Released two major versions and refactored everything almost 3 times while working in a soon to be released major version.
- Built a pretty nice smart contract framework, with the most secure JS library for interacting with web3 and a secure language for converting tx hex data into human readable descriptions. With these base components and an outstanding UI toolkit, we built a dApp which is a runner for simpler dApps and made 4 basic apps ourselves, which can be combined to model different types of governance systems for organizations.
- Grown the community from just the 2 people exactly one year ago to +8000 people, which seems completely crazy as I perfectly remember how excited I was one the first person joined our Slack.
- Assembled a dream team of advisors which help us by providing great insights.
- Conducted the largest token creation event and 4th biggest crowdfunding event in the world at that time, all in a drama-less timespan of 15 minutes.
- Created a network of 20k token holders that value the Aragon Network in ~$200m.
- Created a grants program that will help fund everything that needs building that Aragon and Ethereum need to increase their impact but our small team has decided not to make it a core focus. The program was launched just a couple weeks ago and it is experiencing incredible traction with outstanding proposals.
- Had the opportunity to work with world experts, people and projects we admire on multiple fronts. This is specially crystalized with Aragon Labs, where we are working with the best projects in the space on figuring out how we can make decentralized governance work at scale.
But the biggest achievement, and the hardest challenge, has been convincing 11 freedom fighters to join the team and help building the first native digital jurisdiction that respects freedom, with low barriers of entry and being completely opt-in.
We just had an incredible offsite week in which, with some of our advisors and inverstors, we planned the next months until meeting again for another in-person get together.
In regards to specifically the dev team, we love technical challenges and we consider ourselves a tech ‘company’ that strives to make the best products in the world. But that’s not all, every line of code we write is purely intentional. Each and every line is a political statement towards our shared vision of a more fair and free world.
And precisely that’s the reason our team is so small, we aren’t coding ninjas, even though we spend all day long building. We are a team of politician engineers coding the future instead of convincing voters with dialectic appealing to people’s feelings.
It is going to be incredibly busy and hard to make everything we planned a reality, but we live for this shit.
– Jorge 🦅
