Dear Aragonians! On July 27th, 2019, Aragon Network Vote #3 concluded. Eight Aragon Governance Proposals were approved by the Aragon Association Board of Directors to go on to the final ballot. Seven AGPs were ultimately approved, and one was rejected by ANT holders in this vote. Find the final results from Aragon Network Vote #3 in their official blog. Following its funding approved in Aragon Network Vote #1, the Aragon Association has put together a mid-year report on its activities so far in 2019. Also, read Aragon One’s thesis about what this new reality means for our future! Development is ongoing. Aragon 0.8 will come with a brand new version of aragonUI, based on incredible recent work from the team. It introduces, amongst other things, a series of new components that will make apps more consistent and more pleasant to build. All Aragon Devs call #27 notes are available in the Aragon Wiki. A month ago, Aragon co-founders Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo introduced their new ‘In Flight’ podcast and discussed the evolution of crypto since 2017, IEOs, blockchain fundraising, and decentralized infrastructure. In Episode 4 they talk with Monica Zeng, head of HR at Aragon One. They talk about her experience since the very early foundational days of Aragon, and how she helped assemble the Aragon One team from the very beginning. As for upcoming events, Aragon One CTO Jorge will be presenting on the latest work of Aragon research team at Dappcon in Berlin at the end of August, and the team is planning Asian tour later this year. So far so good. These weeks, the project has passed 630 organizations on mainnet! And the list of DAOs keeps endlessly increasing!
The internet, cryptography, blockchains, and smart contracts turn the world into a single global market, open to all participants, who can now remain pseudonymous since they interact with full assurance in low-trust environments.
-The Aragon One thesis
Development
GitHub metrics:
Developer activity (from Coinlib.io):
Final results from Aragon Network Vote #3
On July 27th, 2019, Aragon Network Vote #3 concluded.
Eight Aragon Governance Proposals (AGPs) were approved by the Aragon Association Board of Directors to go on to the final ballot. Seven AGPs were ultimately approved and one was rejected by ANT holders in this vote.
Here are the final results from Aragon Network Vote #3.
Approved
AGP-59: Community Review Period
AGP-64: Support Quiet Ending Voting
AGP-67: 2019 Aragon Events Multisig Budget
AGP-71: Nest 2019 Budget Extension
AGP-73: Flock Funding for Autark
AGP-75: The Aragon Governance Survey Process
Rejected
AGP-74: Single-purpose native mobile app for Aragon voting
Verifying the vote
You can double-check the results of this vote yourself in the governance.aragonproject.ethorganization on Aragon. You can also see a data export of the vote results on Aragon One engineer Brett Sun’s public Tableau profile.
Feedback welcome
In the spirit of data-driven improvement, the team invites all members of the Aragon community, voters and non-voters alike, to fill out a brief, six-question survey and give the team feedback that will help them improve future Aragon Network votes. Anonymous results from the survey will be made public for the benefit of everyone interested.
Preparing for the next Aragon Network Vote
Aragon Network Vote #4 is scheduled to start October 24th, 2019 at 16:00 UTC. The deadline for turning in draft proposals for the new mandatory community review period is October 3rd, 2019 at 16:00 UTC, and the deadline for turning in final draft proposals for the Aragon Association review is October 10th, 2019 at 16:00 UTC.
This gives Aragon community members a little over two months to prepare AGPs before the next vote. Check the Governance page in the Aragon Wiki for updates about Aragon Network vote scheduling and proposal deadlines in case there are any emergency changes. You can also subscribe to the low-volume Aragon Network Vote Alerts mailing list to receive important vote announcements straight to your inbox.
For complete details about how to make an Aragon Governance Proposal of your own, please review AGP-1, which defines the official process end to end. There are also links to additional resources about the AGP process on the Governance page in the Aragon Wiki. You can ask any questions you have about the Aragon governance process on the Aragon forum or Aragon Chat. And if you have an idea for an AGP that fits into one of the tracks defined in AGP-1, you are invited to start an Aragon forum thread in the Community category using the AGP tag so that Aragon community members can give you feedback about your proposal.
The apps of the Aragon Governance organization have been successfully upgraded via ANT vote. Decentralized governance over code in action!
Aragon Association 2019 mid-year report
The Aragon Association was born in December 2018, as a Switzerland-based Association, with Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo as its board members.
In January 2019, Stefano Bernardi joined the Association to fulfill the Executive Director role. Since AGP-11 was approved during ANV-1, the Aragon Association has been focusing on executing its institutional mandate and corresponding deliverables.
In regard to the above the first months of the year have mostly been spent setting up the operational infrastructure for the Aragon Association, as well as facilitating coordination between Flock teams and, most importantly, prompt execution of the AGP votes.
In this report, the Aragon Association team — shares what they have accomplished so far and what they have planned for H2 2019.
Legal
- Set-up of the Association
- Contracts creation for Flock teams, Nest grants, service providers, etc.
- Contracts for employees and contractors
To-do:
- More work on fully decentralizing Aragon governance
Operations
- Hired first contractor: Louis Giraux
- Set up accounting infrastructure
- Execution of all AGP payments and contracts
- Participated in Edgeware Lockdrop per AGP-35; locked 20,000 ETH for 3 months and signaled with the full Association multisig ETH balance.
Treasury management
- Assessment of current treasury allocation and risk exposure
- Definition of a target balanced allocation for the treasury
- Set-up of infrastructure to be able to operate on markets
- Sold ~20,000 ETH for operational, Nest, Flock, and diversification needs at prices between 165 DAI and 265 DAI
- Per AGP-35, participated in Edgeware lockdrop (20,000 ETH locked and 156,136.562 ETH signalled)
To-do:
- Implementation of strategy to get to the desired portfolio allocation
- Explore options to provide easier ways for Aragon users to acquire ANT
- Continue working on transparency framework
Events
- AraCon 2019 coordination
- Sponsorship of community events
To-do:
- Planning and execution for a potential AraCon 2020
Nest
- New Nest grants allocated: Frame, Aragon Mesh, LevelK
- Nest mid-2019 community update
- Nest v2 proposal to be submitted to voters during ANV-3
Flock
- New security process (see) released and corresponding audits booked for Payroll and Fundraising app
- Tracking Flock team roadmaps and supporting delivery
- Collaboration to establish community report best practices with Autark
In progress:
- Booking audits for TPS and the Aragon Court system
- Implementation security DAO as per the new security process
- Taking over the organization and moderation of Aragon All Devs
- Update to the Flock proposal process (proposal guide)
To-do:
- Coordinate with Flock teams to establish Flock wide “OKRs”
- Establish on-boarding process and best work practices for Flock teams
- Organize all-teams-offsite besides AraCon 2020
Aragon communications
- Being available on forum.aragon.org
- Communication around ANV#2
To-do:
- Think about how AA communicates as a standalone entity.
Total 2019 Aragon Association budget spent
Expenses overview in CHF, through June 6th.
- Event sponsorship: 7,142.29
- Legal Fees: 37,191.67
- Salary cost: 98,971.27
- Other operating expenses: 36,521.54
Total 2019 Aragon Network Treasury spent
Expenses overview in CHF, through June 6th.
- Grants: 3,990,830.00
Aragon 0.8 will come with a brand new version of aragonUI,
based on incredible recent work from the team.
It introduces, amongst other things, a series of new components that will make apps more consistent and more pleasant to build. Let’s have a look at the components the team used to build the new version of the Tokens app!
First, the Header component. It contains two slots, primary and secondary, that allows to set the name of the app and some main action like the “Add tokens” button here.
Then they have Box. It creates simple surfaces, adds spacing automatically, and optionally takes a heading.
DataView is a component that displays data either as a table or a list layout. It can optionally adjust itself based on the available space and provides other features, such as a selection mode and expandable items. Here, they want it to act as a table, even on smaller views.
Split creates a two columns layout when the space is available, and a single column otherwise.
Publications from Aragon forum:
On ‘aragonpm.eth’ governance by Jorge Izquierdo, CTO Aragon One.
Aragon Working Groups — applications are now open by Louis Giraux, Aragon Association.
Aragon Templates Permissions Diagrams by Daniel Shavit, Pando.
Updates from Aragon chat (16th July — 30th July):
@luis (Luis Cuende, CEO at Aragon One Team):
- Trip to Berlin to work with the Aragonians there!
- A1 management
- Work on product coordination
- A1 internal Q3 goals
- Read more about working groups
- Work on DAO use cases
@light (John Light, Community at Aragon One):
- Continued prep for ANV-3
- Start planning for Devcon5 trip and Asian tour (if you’re familiar with Asian crypto communities and open to chat, DM me!)
- More work on upcoming blog posts
- Published final details post for ANV-3
- Worked with AA to publish 2019 mid-year report
- Started work on Asia tour planning (Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore — if you are from any of these cities or know Aragon/Ethereum enthusiasts who are, let’s chat!)
- More Asia tour planning
- Prepping for ANV-3 starting this Thursday @ 1600 UTC
- Working on upcoming blog posts
- Catching up on community related tasks
@monica (Monica Zeng, Human Relations at Aragon One):
- Screening and interviewing candidates + sending and reviewing technical challenges
- New team member onboarding!
- Founders and team coaching sessions
- Strategy sessions
- Review some ops stuff
- Payroll and reimbursements
- Misc HR legal and processes
and traveled to Berlin to work with Autark and met Aragon Black people!:)
- Coaching and professional development sessions with the team
- Coordinate with Lorena ops/logistics stuff
@sohkai (Brett Sun, Lead Developer at Aragon One):
- Review current email notification service implementation
- Focus on 0.8 frontend implementation
- Review notification service backend, finalize details
- Review Voting delegation PRs
- Review templates refactor and new templates for 0.8
- Automated deploys for aragon/aragon to nightly.aragon.org and nightly-rinkeby.aragon.org
- Freeze new organization templates for 0.8
- Catch up on 0.8 frontend work
- Get back towards stabilizing aragonAPI v2
- Reviewing Ale’s work on the new organization templates, freezing this week instead
- Closed some loose ends towards a stable aragonAPI v2
- Hotfixes for ANV3
- Overhauling certain pieces of aragon.js / aragonAPI
- Continue with 0.8’s frontend
- Blog post on the 0.7 smart contract upgrade
@bingen (Bingen Eguzkitza, Solidity Engineer):
- Court: rebase and finish split final round
- Court: split staking and final round
- Review a bunch of Template PRs by @facuspagnuolo
@bpierre (Pierre Bertet, UI & Interaction Developer):
- Permissions (WIP)
- Finish Permissions
- New onboarding
@aquigorka (Gorka Ludlow, Frontend at Aragon One):
- Global Preferences <- needs components from newstyle `aragonUI`, so will be working on that
- Debug macos and ios browsers
- Start migrating Finance to newstyle
- Global settings. Finance and components to AragonUI
- Voting new styles
- Finance new styles and started work on Voting new styles
- Continue with Voting new styles
@chrishobcroft:
- Kick off call for Empower The DAO with @jorge, @louisgrx and @willjgriff
- Planning and prep for ETD community calls with Uniswap, ENS and Compound
- Sign up for community calls here: https://communitygovernance.typeform.com/to/bwXdnR
- Final prep and execution of community calls (31 July)
- Publish video recordings of community calls, and distribute
- Finalise scope document with @willjgriff
@facuspagnuolo (Facu Spagnuolo):
- New DAO templates
- Reviewing court contracts architecture
- Spiking a `CourtStaking` alternative
- Analyze bonding-curve for the ANJ token
- Polishing new templates
- Start working on a testing strategy for the court
- Test new templates deploy
- Finish jurors registry
- Continue working on the testing strategy for the court
@gabi:
- Finish work with `gas-price` and `aragen`
- Trying to get devcon tickets
@ajsantander:
- Did my trial week, building an Aragon “Holographic Consensus” Voting app: https://github.com/ajsantander/hc
- Wrapped up left over details of the HC voting app (mainly wrote a lot of tests).
- Started my onboarding process to join Aragon One.
- Work on a contract for bootstrapping an Aragon Black’s Fundraising app to a DAO, only after an initial funding goal is met.
- Resolve some issues in the dao-templates repo to accelerate the release of the new templates.
- Continue assisting with the release of the new templates.
- Continue work on the fundraising bootstrapping app.
@willjgriff:
EmpowerTheDao:
- Completed Truffle projects for basic local deployments of Uniswap, Compound and ENS. - Started work on Template Aragon Agent app — Complete Template Aragon Agent app — Start work on Compound app
1Hive:
- Code-reviewing - Created empty base project for dalay-app — Writing tests/Solidity if time
See also:
- All Aragon Devs #27 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
The Aragon One thesis
Zero to one enablers
The internet turns the world into a single global market.
Cryptography enables pseudonymous secure authentication.
Blockchains introduce a single shared source of truth.
Using blockchains, smart contracts enable market interactions in low-trust environments.
Thanks to those four enablers, the following holds true:
The internet, cryptography, blockchains, and smart contracts turn the world into a single global market, open to all participants, who can now remain pseudonymous since they interact with full assurance in low-trust environments.
Principles
Let’s go deeper into what those enablers unlock in the areas of legality, computer interaction and organizational structures.
First, smart contracts encode self-enforceable rules. Because of that, they create a new legality. A legality that is computer-native, fundamentally different from traditional legality.
Therefore smart contracts can and will achieve full sovereignty from existing legal systems.
Second, abstracting authentication using cryptography means pseudonymity is possible. But it also means that machines can interact with these new systems.
With pseudonymity and code-as-law, machines become first-class citizens.
Finally, smart contracts turn organizational structures into code. These new organizational structures are sovereign, global, and inclusive of pseudonymous participants.
Now let’s explore the effects that these principles will produce on society.
Effects
The Cambrian explosion of governance
All men are created equal was the rallying cry to dethrone kings.
As part of that ethos, one-person one-vote was born, bringing much progress to our society.
Democracy was born in a period when humans demanded individual freedoms. Society was extremely hierarchical and inequality was rampant. Feuds and oligarchies didn’t age well, and the new era required a new way to organize society.
But now modern politics has reached its maturity point. It’s now so entrenched into our society that it’s turning into entertainment, more than rational decision-making.
Everything has a finite life. If current political systems were a technological revolution, we would now see that they are clearly in its last phase.
In that last phase, we have already squeezed all the potential from the model, and a new model awakens.
Political elections around the world are showing us that the current model hasn’t aged well.
Corruption accounts for more than $2 trillion per year. One-person one-vote has weakened as a principle due to illiteracy, data-driven manipulation, and echo chambers.
There is also no personal downside for taking blatantly wrong voting decisions, no skin in the game. One-person one-vote is a nice tool in the toolbox, but it shouldn’t blind us from experimenting with more advanced governance systems.
We have also been tricked by the wrong metrics. We usually look at the participation rate or number of voters to measure the health of a governance system. But it’s neither of those. It’s the quality of the decisions that the system makes.
With that in mind, we can move on from all the prejudices we acquired about governance centuries ago, and experiment with new models.
The dark era of politics will usher the Enlightenment of governance.
Governance becomes empirical
With the advent of futarchy, objective governance will start to emerge.
We can imagine running entire countries with it, as Ralph Merkle envisions.
Governance has always been subjective, and it will likely continue to be that way. But with the advent of smart contracts, dry code has started permeating our world.
Dry code thrives on data. Network participants will be able to measure and predict the impact of governance decisions.
Markets for algorithmic governance will emerge. The brightest engineers will then focus on how to improve the way we make decisions.
The most important component of success is not working hard, it’s making the right decisions. Through evolved governance mechanisms we will improve at making decisions, kickstarting a new era of abundance.
A merging of stakeholder governance and common goods
Stakeholder governance is one of the most proven governance models. Those who provide capital, labor, or any other valuable asset receive stake. With that stake, they can exercise governance power.
The model itself works. But it has lead to enormous wealth concentration. That’s because only select investors could access the best market opportunities.
Crypto and public fundraising changes these dynamics. Every network participant has access to the same funding opportunities as the most well-connected VC.
Institutional investors will still have more capital to pour into these networks. But at least smaller investors will have the chance too.
The internet shouldn’t be owned by a company. We are on that path with Google.
Mars shouldn’t be owned by a person. We are on that path with SpaceX, which is currently majority owned and controlled by Elon Musk.
There is no doubt that Google deserves to profit from building part of the internet as we know it.
And there is no doubt that if SpaceX enables humankind to populate Mars, Elon deserves to profit from that.
But the crypto fundraising model is a great improvement that the team hopes can enable larger groups of people to own common goods, and to enable the public to profit from great investment opportunities.
With these new fundraising models we can also bring producers and consumers closer together. Users and network participants may also become governors of the network itself.
The internet becomes the ultimate jurisdiction
Traditional jurisdictions since the dawn of the agricultural age through to the modern era enjoyed rapid growth as their returns on violence increased. With decentralized organizations, the ability to exercise violence diminishes. With that, the returns on violence diminish as well.
This will cause traditional jurisdictions to re-think their place in the world. They will begin to take competition for citizens more seriously. Citizens, in turn, will use their newfound leverage to shop around for the mostly friendly jurisdiction that will accommodate their lifestyle.
Increasingly, citizens will opt out of traditional jurisdictions altogether and conduct more of their business entirely online. They will work for an internet-native organization, get paid with internet-native money, and go to an internet-native court in case of any business disputes.
The power of traditional jurisdictions will wane as the internet becomes the preferred jurisdiction for commerce.
Software eats governance
This paradigm shift requires new tools for human organization.
These tools need to be:
- Fully programmable
- Global by default
- Pseudonymous-first
- As trust-minimized as possible
Aragon meets all of these criteria. With Aragon, humans can now experiment with governance at the speed of software.
Eventually humans will create software that runs those experiments on their own.
Artificial intelligence will help us govern ourselves better than has ever been possible before.
Eventually, software eats governance.
Next reads on the Aragon One thesis series:
In Flight by Aragon One
a podcast about Aragon hosted by Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo
Episode 4: The human side of Aragon One
In this episode, hosts talk with Monica Zeng, head of HR at Aragon One. They talk about her experience since the very early foundational days of Aragon, and how she helped assemble the Aragon One team from the very beginning.
Upcoming events:
August 21st-23rd: Dappcon, Berlin Institute of Technology, Berlin. Aragon One CTO Jorge will be presenting on the latest work of Aragon research team.
Asia tour (Tokyo, Seoul, Taipei, Hong Kong, and Singapore).
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.
Information from Coinmarketcap.com:
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.
See also Aragon One mid-2019 roadmap update.
Partnerships and team members
Autark:
Autark under the spotlight for ANV-3.
Introducing 3Box Profiles in Aragon.
Autark shows off Open Enterprise app re-designs using the new aragonUI framework
Aragon Black:
Call for papers! Aragon Black Blog is looking for fresh ideas and papers. So do not hesitate to contact them. Let’s decentralize! Here’s the Raven website.
- Check out job openings at Aragon One and Autark.
Rumors
Twitter:
Other:
- Building DAOs with Aragon — A framework to create decentralized autonomous organizations by Gaurav Agrawal.
- Check Awesome Aragon list curated by Luke Duncan!: the list of resources related to the Aragon Ecosystem.
- 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.
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.
Check out Aragon forum.
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.
