Aragon is ahead of the pack! During these weeks the team introduced Aragon Fundraising, an app providing Aragon users an easy way to raise funds through an emergent organization with a batched bonding curve smart contract. Aragon Fundraising is a critical app that will allow DAOs to flourish. Bring on the DAICO! These weeks the project has passed 575 organizations on mainnet! And the list of DAOs keeps endlessly increasing. Development is ongoing. Last week Aragon 0.7.4 released — another minor release with identities autocomplete and new enhancements to the identities labeling system. All Aragon Devs call #24 notes are available in the Aragon Wiki. Gorka Ludlow, frontend at Aragon One was asked to present the frontend architecture that powers and runs the Aragon client so he wrote a blog post in which he shares and describes what that entails. Luis Cuende wrote a few blog posts on the Aragon forum. Video on “Creating a global co-op with Aragon” from meetup at Progressbar with Luis is now online. Aragon Black Monthly #2 — a collection of texts, analyses, interviews, meetings around a specific theme — was published! The second post covers history of decentralization, etymology through French Revolution and crypto Tocqueville, coming back on Vitalik Buterin article and meaning of decentralization, controversies and concrete cases. And last but not least — Aragon Governance Proposals for Aragon Network Vote #3 are due in one month! You can find details about the upcoming vote, including important dates and instructions about how to submit your own proposal, in the Aragon Network Vote #3 Megathread in the forum. Stay tuned!
Development
Aragon 0.7.4 is live
This is another minor release with identities autocomplete and new enhancements to the identities labeling system.
- Just start typing and the autocomplete will assist you in finding the right label.
- You can also label apps now. For example you can rename the Voting app to Board, Community, or any other name that makes the organization feel more familiar to you
- The team has also introduced the functionality to selectively remove labels, so you don’t have to remove them all at once
Try out the Aragon 0.7.4 release with all these improvements at https://app.aragon.org or with the desktop client.
Introducing Aragon Fundraising
Aragon Fundraising, previously called Apiary, is an app built on top of Aragon, providing Aragon users an easy way to raise funds through an emergent organization. It has been developed by the Aragon Black team and will be available on the Ethereum mainnet this (northern) summer.
This innovative model distinguishes itself by leveraging aragonOS’s apps ecosystem and permissions system, a batched bonding curve implementation that incentivizes “skin in the game” and curation with multiple collateral token support, novel measures preventing front-running, and a tap mechanism that sustains the underlying project while safeguarding the majority of funds from depletion.
Splitting funds into reserve and discretionary pools provides smart contract-enforced accountability between project contributors and patrons throughout the lifecycle of a project while simultaneously ensuring sufficient liquidity to support the emergence of a long-tail of organizations.
Architecture
The Aragon Fundraising app architecture is based upon Vitalik Buterin’s description of a Decentralized Autonomous Initial Coin Offering (aka DAICO) and Luke Duncan’s seminal research about emergent organizations.
The cornerstone of this application is a bonding curve smart contract: an automated-market maker where any user can deposit collateral in exchange for an organization-specific token. This market maker accepts both ETH and / or any ERC20 as a collateral. However, the first released default template will be set to accept DAI and ANT only (for a curve behavior that’s as intuitively readable as possible) although customization will be available at a granular level through the use of the aragonCLI.
The market maker contract mints tokens to stakers at a price determined by the initialization parameters according to the existing token supply. This guarantees continuous liquidity while incentivizing curation and funding for social good.
The collaterals deposited along the curve are automatically transferred into a reserve pool. However, the funds held in this reserve pool cannot be spent directly. A tap mechanism controls the percent of this reserve that can be withdrawn in a given time period to a discretionary vault to encourage a reasonable use of the funds. Token holders of the organization can then vote to allocate funds held by the discretionary vault and fund the tasks their project encompasses.
Sensitive actions such as raising the tap are permissioned so that changes require consent of the patrons. There is even a patrons-controlled 30 day buffer for raising tap percentages in case a conflict arises. Setting a continuously updatable tap for raised funds instead of a lump sum transfer provides accountability and alignment of interests between different parties related to the curve. The Fundraising app thus enables exploration, curation, and staking into networks that are allocating and producing value as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs).
Modularity
The Aragon Fundraising app has been designed to be as modular as possible. Market-making, token management, withdrawal of funds and control of these funds are enforced by different contracts wired to each other through aragonOS’s ACL system. This architecture allows projects to fine-tune their emergent organization’s governance model and developers to build upon Aragon library to develop additional fundraising modules. Aragon team already intend to extend their libraries with some modulation of incentive structures and prevention of pump and dump through token locking.
The tap mechanism will also be complemented by different discreet withdrawal methods bringing organizations one step closer to automation. Beyond Aragon fundraising library, aragonOS’ modular permissions system enables powerful organization designs that can also depart from the simple model exhibited above: you’ll soon be free to connect Aragon Fundraising to That Planning Suite’s project management apps, a pando/git repository, or the upcoming Futarchy app!
Preventing front-running attacks
The Aragon Fundraising app addresses the critical issue of front-running in bonding curves and decentralized exchanges, where an adversarial actor (typically a miner) can see a large transaction incoming and spends more gas to fill in a faster order. The bonding curve contract is the first implementation of a batched bonding curve conceived by Aragon own Billy Rennekamp. By batching orders and pricing them at a Common Clearing Price front-running is prevented. As a beneficial side effect mass exits are able to occur at a uniform price.
Coming soon
Aragon Fundraising reduces barriers to collaboration. It enables organizations to raise capital while granting contributors a clear set of associated rights and privileges. As a user it makes it easy to join and participate in a decentralized organization, and as an organization it provides a framework for attracting and rewarding contributors.
Fundraising will soon launch on the Rinkeby testnet and, pending completion of security audits, will be released this summer on the Ethereum mainnet. While the upcoming release will be public the team will also be supporting a few select projects pre-release.
If you are interested in using Aragon Fundraising please drop the team a line or fill out this form.
Aragon Frontend Walkthrough
by Gorka Ludlow, Frontend at Aragon One
This past February, ßingen (an Aragon colleague) and Gorka attended the Ethereum Dev Barcelona meetup. After the presentations, they had the opportunity to meet with the other attendees and share their ideas. As part of the conversation, they were introduced to Jose Luis Muñoz and found out he is the director for the Master’s degree in blockchain technologies at the Polytechnic University of Catalonia. They shared with him some of their day-to-day activities, and he thought it would be fun for them to showcase Aragon by proposing a lecture & workshop about it for their students.
One month later, they met up at the designated classroom and started talking about Aragon’s mission. Gorka was tasked with describing the frontend architecture that powers and runs the Aragon client, this post shares what he spokes of that day.
Publications from Aragon forum:
Witnet’s feedback on developer experience by Luis Cuende. The Witnet team built on Aragon 3 at the Ethereum Madrid Hackathon. Luis jumped on a call with them and asked about their dev experience. Publishing some notes from the call here.
[GUIDE] Using a vanilla ERC20 token with Aragon by Luis Cuende.
Authorship standards for AGPs by John Light.
AGP discussion: An “Executive Branch” for the Aragon Network by John Light.
Test organization for decentralizing aragonpm.eth (AGP-28) by Gabi.
Liquid reserves, dah by Andriy Tyurnikov.
dMergers and dAcquisitions by Andriy Tyurnikov.
Funding proposal: Mapping out the Aragon DAO landscape by Eric Arsenault.
AragonCoop — Six Weeks after AGP-40 approval by Gustavo.
Aragon Governance Proposals for Aragon Network Vote #3 are due in one month! You can find details about the upcoming vote, including important dates and how to submit a proposal of your own, in the Aragon Network Vote #3 Megathread.
Other:
Black Monthly #2 A History of Decentralization: publication in Aragon Black blog.
DAOG — An open ended decentralized governance game by Austint Griffith: Gaming will drive adoption and onboarding in the blockchain space. Successful games will not copy web 2.0 games, but reinvent new mechanics that utilize web 3.0 strengths. Games should also emulate other concepts in the ecosystem to give us a sandbox to explore. 2019 is the year of the DAO. A decentralized autonomous organization game will empower a group of players to employ governance tactics to work together or compete to accomplish a goal.
Updates from Aragon chat (4th June — 18th June)
@luis (Luis Cuende, CEO at Aragon One Team):
- Work side by side with @stefanobernardi @louisgrx
- Work with @monica
- Assist with user advocacy
- Record podcasts
@light (John Light, Community at Aragon One):
- Finalized plans for Berlin Blockchain Week
- Write position statement for Wharton Cryptogovernance workshop
- Participated in AGP discussions
- Attended and participated in Future Frontiers in Austin
- Catch up after Future Frontiers
- More AGP discussions
- Help with publishing a few upcoming blog posts
@tatu (Tatu Kärki, Communications at Aragon One):
- Worked on the wiki redesign
- Review, editing and publishing of Proposal Agreements and the Aragon Court and Aragon Frontend Walkthrough blog posts
- Finalized first AraCon interviews
- Wiki redesign
@monica (Monica Zeng, Human Relations at Aragon One):
- Work with @luis and @jorge
- Hiring: application, screenings, interviews and technical challenges 🔥
- Offsite related decisions
- Coaching team members
@LorenaGM (Lorena González, Assistant at Aragon One):
- Agenda management
- A1 HQ: suppliers follow-ups & organizational tasks
- Logistics: Offsite (transfers and house set up)
- Accounting: monthly expense report and accountants meeting (books for Q1 and Q2)
- Documentation review & claims and complaints
-A1 HQ: shopping, dealing with providers, follow-ups & organizational tasks
-Logistics: Offsite (final set up)
-Misc. administrative tasks: payments, budgets & claims and complaints
@sohkai (Brett Sun, Lead Developer at Aragon One):
- Vacation
Planned for this week:
- Sync and catch up with team
- Discuss 0.8 roadmap
@bingen (Bingen Eguzkitza, Solidity Engineer):
- Court: address Jorge’s review comments (PRs #41, #44, #49)
- Court: final appeal rounds (issue #19), terms without randomness (issue #15) and batch settle round slashing (issue #42)
- dao-kits: review PRs #73, #74, #75, #76
- Review Single delegation voting by Facu (aragon-apps PR #881) and aragon-apps PR #883
- Review Token wrapper concierge by Facu
- Court: final appeal round: refactor
- dao-kits: review #72, #77, #79
- aragonOS review #532, #534
- aragon-apps review #881, #886
- Meet Systems engineer candidate
@bpierre (Pierre Bertet, UI & Interaction Developer):
- Implement the new design system in aragonUI (WIP)
- New layout for Aragon client (WIP)
@aquigorka (Gorka Ludlow, Frontend at Aragon One):
- Autocomplete all around (apps and client)
- Fix tokens suggestions error and better handling on suggestions to sections
- Customizable menu bar/app instance labels
- Frontend walkthrough post published
- Web worker in iframe
- Helpscout click outside/blur for iframe apps
@danielnorman (Daniel Norman):
- Support @aquigorka with autocomplete
- API to approve ERC20 on a different contract / context (https://github.com/aragon/aragon.js/issues/309)
- Hotfix for voting app — fix invalid vote callscript causing the background script to crash
- Email notification service
- Support Identities autocomplete
@delfi (Delfina Polito, Frontend at Aragon One):
- Developer portal enhancements
- New section a1 website
- Delete single label (product)
- Update website roadmap
- Delete selected labels
- Improvements to the custom label share link
@jon:
- Finally got the profile node module working
- Completed add, hide, revise discussion comment features
- Research forwarders, and how we might implement contextual discussions as a forwarder
- Experiments around making discussions a forwarder, try and get the basics working so that discussion modules can easily be supported in any app
@facuspagnuolo (Facu Spagnuolo):
- Delegation voting
- Refactoring dao kits structure
See also:
- All Aragon Devs #24 video.
- Aragon App Development Survey: Autark would like to hear about your experience, especially if you had trouble or faced limitations. Please take a few minutes to take this brief survey and help us make it easier to #BUIDL with Aragon.
Social encounters
- Creating a global co-op with Aragon — Hosted by Progressbar with Aragon co-founder and Aragon One CEO Luis Cuende.
Finance
Token holders and the number of transactions dynamics (from Etherscan.io):
There is a slight grows in the number of token-holders these weeks.
Roadmap
Aragon Network
Current
Granular areas of focus with well defined scope and product specifications.
- Delegate voting
Allow people to delegate their voting power to delegates (i.e. representatives) who can vote on their behalf and continue experimenting with new voting mechanisms. Enhanced voting. Aragon One
- Staking and Lock Managers
Provides a secure foundation for managing collateral deposits for agreements while allowing collateral assets to be used in to participate in governance. Dispute Resolution. Aragon One
- Aragon Court PoC
This deliverable includes the Aragon Court protocol, an interface for users of the court to review and manage agreements and disputes, and an interface for jurors to participate in the arbitration process. Dispute Resolution. Aragon One.
Near-term
Wider areas of focus with some flexibility on the scope.
- Proposals agreements
Aragon agreements are a core component of the Aragon Network, they enable users to define human-readable obligations and lock collateral to provide assurances to their counter-parties. Dispute Resolution. Aragon One.
- Vote Relay Protocol
Improve the experience and scalability of voting by implementing a protocol for votes to be submitted to a set of bonded relayers. Enhanced Voting. Aragon One
Aragon Client
Current
Granular areas of focus with well defined scope and product specifications.
- Responsive view
Make the platform and core apps responsive so Aragon can be used from mobile browsers such as Status or Cipher. Mobile experience. Aragon One.
- Local identity (custom labels)
As an intermediate solution for the full Aragon identity experience, we will allow people to create custom local labels to identify addresses that represent different members of the organization. Identity experience. Aragon One.
- Finalize Planning Suite
Finalize the development of the Planning Suite, which enables issue curation, allocating bounties as a DAO, budgeting via range voting, and on-chain mapping of human-readable names to Ethereum addresses. Autark.
- Upgrading apps from the UI
Provide users with a secure way to upgrade app versions, fixes for features or enhancements to already installed/in use apps. App center. Aragon One.
- Agent application
This application will enable organizations to interact natively with other web3 applications (including other Aragon organizations). Agent application. Aragon One.
- Rewards App
Allow organizations to distribute payments to token holders based on the number of tokens earned in a specific period (one-time reward) or based on total holdings (dividend). Autark.
- Payroll app
This app will allow organizations to manage on-chain salary payments and for employees to request payments and see their available balance. UX improvements. Aragon One.
- Notifications & user feedback
Implement an activity panel that will provide people information about ongoing and past transactions as well as a toast component for immediate feedback on users’ actions. UX improvements. Aragon One.
- Concierge project
Guided on-boarding of projects interested in collaboration with Aragon or use Aragon tools for their governance needs. UX improvements. Aragon One.
- Organization Identity
Allow organizations to manage their manifesto, mission statement, values, code of conduct, and contact information so it’s easily accessible to prospective and current members of the organization. Autark.
Near-term
Wider areas of focus with some flexibility on the scope.
- Browsing, installing & uninstalling apps
Enhance app discovery and app management for end users. Expand the on-boarding and app center experience. App center. Aragon One.
- Individual identity
Allow individuals to create and manage their user profiles, mapping their address to a human readable name that can be used to interact with apps within the organization. Identity experience. Aragon One.
- Rich User Profiles
Allow individuals to associate additional details to their identity such as Github commit history, work history, portfolios, and membership to other Aragon organizations. Autark.
- Data Storage and Standards
Design the implementation strategy and information architecture for user profiles and contextual discussions. Document infrastructure solutions and recommendations for Aragon apps that require fast and queryable data that is hosted on distributed storage. Autark.
- Organizations templates
Research new organizational models, define the apps and permissions required to realize them and create kits that people can use. UX improvements. Aragon One.
- Organization identity & membership
Allow users to create and manage their organizations’ profiles, providing an intuitive way to add members to a given organization and granting them permissions & privileges. Identity experience. Aragon One.
- Reputation Support
Expand governance possibilities by providing more features for reputation-based organizations, including the ability to allocation non-transferable tokens in place of (or in addition to) traditional bounties. Autark.
- aragonSDK: Split aragonUI and Lorikeet
Push Lorikeet as an ecosystem-wide project, while still providing an Aragon-opinionated experience with aragonUI. Lorikeet design system. Aragon One.
- Expanded Forwarder Options
Allow for more tightly coupled forwarder interactions where the forwarded call data can be leveraged and modified within the Forwarder contract. Autark.
Partnerships and team members
- Check out job openings at Aragon One and Autark.
Rumors
Twitter:
TFW when you read/write documentation for @AragonProject
Here is news of a milestone in the project to integrate @LivepeerOrg with @AragonProject.
An Aragon DAO on #Ethereum mainnet delegated Livepeer Tokens to a Transcoder in Livepeer’s network.
This will provide the DAO with a share of income to the network.
This DAO has received its first rewards in $LPT, for participating in Round 1372 of the @LivepeerOrg delegated-proof-of-stake protocol.
It started with 0.2 LPT, and now it has 0.200614701104992279 LPT :)
A round lasts 5760 blocks.
Reddit discussions:
Other:
- Community governance has been a core value of the Aragon project from Day 1. Check out the new Governance page on Aragon website to learn how to participate.
Social media metrics
Social media activity:
Social media dynamics:
Aragon community continues to grow. There is a constant slight growth in Aragon social media channels. The number of subscribers of Aragon Black Twitter increased by more than 29% these weeks.
Twitter — Average number of retweets is 10–15 for one post.
AragonBlackTeam @AragonBlackTeam Twitter: The Pando network team is applying to join Aragon project & become the 3rd team that will stand beside Aragon One Team and Autark in its fight for freedom.
The number of Reddit threads’ comments are: 1–15.
Aragon chat — Active discussions on development and development help.
The Aragon Chat channels are also available through Matrix.org / Riot.im, bridged with the Rocket Chat channels so you can choose which client / interface you prefer to use to chat with the community. The Aragon community in Matrix / Riot.
Popular topics from Aragon forum:
[GUIDE] Custom Aragon Organization Deployment using the CLI
Community Initiative: Aragon Cooperative
EthDAO: Making Ethereum great again
AGP Townhall Meeting (This Thursday!)
Aragon Flock proposal: Aragon Black
Aragon Network Vote #2 Megathread
Aragon Network Vote #1 Megathread
How to make proposals to the Community Funding
There is a slight growth in Aragon community over time. The graph above shows the dynamics of changes in the number of Aragon Reddit subscribers and Twitter followers. Aragon project has no Facebook page. The information is taken from Coingecko.com.
