Aragon Association

Aragon Association

Type	Token
Ticker symbol	ANT
Total supply	39,609,523 ANT

Basics

• Started in:
• Based in: Switzerland
• Foundation dissolved itself in 11-2023.
• Fka Aragon
• “Aragon is everything you need to operate your company or organisational structure, on Ethereum. Aragon lets everyone create value without borders or intermediaries. Cap table, vesting, payments, voting, bylaws, fundraising and identity all in a beautiful, unified interface.”
• “A time consuming and often expensive aspect of starting a new company is allocating and managing shares. As companies grow and raise more funds they eventually need to issue and move shares around. Aragon is an example of a promising project that has an easy to use interface for managing the company’s cap table and raising capital.”

• The product’s full deployment on the mainnet is due around May 2018. The second Alpha is available. 1100+ organizations joined the two Aragon testnets so far (5-2017) (update: still no mainnet 9-2018, update again; mainnet did launch in november 2018). After going live on mainnet 200 organisations were launched within 2 months.

History

• The Aragon Association (AA) will deploy most of the treasury to allow all token holders to redeem ANT for ETH while dissolving itself (2-11-2023).
• From CoinDesk (10-5-2023):

"The Aragon Association on Tuesday canceled its plans for holders of its ANT token to wield broad voting powers over everything from strategic direction to a $200 million treasury, dealing a major blow to the DAO-focused Ethereum startup’s own transition to a decentralized autonomous organization. The Association, a Swiss entity that oversees Aragon, said it “acted on its fiduciary duty to secure its treasury and mission by repurposing the Aragon DAO as part of a new grants program” after undergoing a “51% attack” from activist investors betting on the price of ANT."

• AN DAO grew out of Aragon (17-8-2022):

"we need to deploy a new DAO that supports delegated voting and the requirements specified in the Proposal: Transfer the Aragon Project Funds to an Aragon DAO Governed by (Delegated) ANT 3. The current AN DAO was deployed on Aragon Govern and does not support delegation."

The vote got accepted with 0.9% of ANT voting.

Audits & Exploits

• Bug bounty program can be found here. Max payout is $50,000 (29-6-2020).
• Blockchain Security DB (29-6-2020) shows 3audits. The latest was in 8-2019.

Bugs/Exploits

• Two bugs were found in Aragon Court. From their disclosure (31-3-2020):

"Two bugs were reported by renowned security researcher samczsun, which were fixed on February 9th, along with unrelated UX improvements.

In late February, a third bug was discovered by Bingen, a core contributor to Aragon Court from Aragon One, which was fixed on March 16th."

Governance

Aragon Network DAO

• Aragon has removed (13-3-2020) AGP voting for ANT holders.
• From this blog (20-12-2019):

"An initial council manages the Aragon Network DAO during Phases 1 and 2 of the launch process. The council will later be dissolved and transfer full control of the Aragon Network DAO (Phase 3) to ANT holders, as described in the launch process outlined in AGP-126.

The following members govern the Aragon Network DAO:

1. Aaron Foster (Aragon community): Early supporter and exceptionally active community member
2. Facundo Spagnuolo (Aragon One): Aragon Network team lead at Aragon One
3. Griff Green (Commons Stack): Giveth founder and member of the Whitehat Group
4. Jesse Pollak (Coinbase): Engineering leader for Coinbase’s consumer organization
5. Joel Monegro (Placeholder): Partner at Placeholder

The council has committed to executing the following responsibilities:

1. Starting the Aragon Court pre-activation period by transferring control over ANJ to the appropriate smart contract. The AN DAO already executed this on December 17th.
2. Transition Aragon Network DAO’s governance to ANT holders when Phase 3 can be safely executed.
3. Govern Aragon Court, re-parametrizing it if needed, and act in case of an emergency to protect users, ANJ holders, and ANT holders."

• Aragon Court is live (10-2-2020) on mainnet, arbitration for their DAOs. currently working on some moot/hypothetical cases. "During the pre-activation period, more than 1,000,000 ANT has been staked into the system, with 247 jurors signing up."
• After the Court went live Tim Draper has taken (19-2-2020) a 1 million ANT stake (worth about $760,000 at press time) in Aragon.

Law Suits

• Aragon sued (22-5-2020) to avoid paying grantee a community-voted grant to Autark. The Defiant wrote a good piece explaining both sides.

Tokens

Aragon (ANT)

• From this blog (28-11-2019) on why it has ANT and also other tokens:

"The Aragon Network already has a native token, ANT. At the moment, ANT is used for governance in Aragon Network votes, with which ANT holders have the opportunity to set the direction of the project and how it allocates its resources.

However, in the original Aragon whitepaper, the idea of Aragon Network services was introduced. The whitepaper mentioned that, in the case that these services needed a token, ANT or a derivative token would be used.

For security reasons Aragon Court needs a token for selecting jurors to work and economically punish them if they behave maliciously. If Aragon Court was the only foreseen service that the Aragon Network will be launching, using ANT as the staking token for Aragon Court would be perfectly safe.

However, as we expect other services such as Aragon Chain to also need a staking token, using a single token for multiple proof of stake type protocols becomes dangerous, as the success of one protocol could make the less valuable protocol really cheap to attack.

Because ANT will be used as collateral for derivative tokens such as Aragon Court’s ANJ or Aragon Chain’s ARA, we now consider ANT to be a store of value asset whose circulating supply will shrink as these derived tokens grow in value and absorb more and more ANT. You can read more about the impact of ANJ’s demand in the valuation of ANT in this Aragon Forum post."

• Has debuted (7-2020) ANT Liquidity Rewards incentives for Uniswap v2 liquidity in tandem with a native LP dashboard.

Aragon Network Juror (ANJ)

• From this blog (20-12-2019):

"The Aragon Network DAO has just deployed the Aragon Network Juror (ANJ) pre-activation smart contract. This pre-activation contract has received controller power over ANJ, allowing it to mint tokens according to the rules of the contract.

Aragon Court is the first Aragon Network service protocol, and ANJ is its native token, which jurors need to stake and activate in the Court to be selected to work and earn dispute fees."

Coin Distribution

• Tim Draper has taken (19-2-2020) a 1 million ANT stake (worth about $760,000 at press time) in Aragon.

Tech

• Whitepaper can be found [insert here].
• Code can be viewed [insert here].
• Built on: First Ethereum, but will move (1-7-2020) to its own Tendermint based PoS Aragon Chain.

 How it works

• From ChainSafe's blog (1-7-2020), they work on it:

"The first testnet released will behave as Aragon does on Ethereum but without the economics layer. Because Aragon Chain will feature Tendermint proof of stake consensus, the economics of securing the chain will be quite different than on the current Ethereum proof of work chain. For this reason, we will release a second testnet that includes the economic layer after users have had some time to experiment with the first testnet. This second testnet should behave exactly as Aragon Chain will after mainnet launch, and will include the bonding curve for converting ANT into ARA as well as a connection to ChainBridge, which will enable the transfer of value and information between Aragon Chain and Aragon on Ethereum."

Upgrades

Introduced (12-9-2024) gasless voting across multichain through LayerZero and zkSync's account abstraction which uses paymasters to front the DAO voting costs.

Different Implementations

• Users are now (30-6-2020) able to bridge their Aragon DAO within any dApp (and thus their users) through Aragon Connect.

Interoperability

• Will have a ChainBridge with Ethereum.

Oracle Method

• Aragon DAOs can access Web2 data using Airnode: an open-source, first-party oracle built by the API3 DAO (9-2021).

Their Projects

Aragon Court

• From Crypto Briefing (6-10-2020):

"Aragon and Balancer Labs are collaborating to launch Snapshot, an off-chain voting platform. Through the implementation of Aragon Agreements and Aragon Court, Snapshot will enable DAOs to take their off-chain voting and record it on the Ethereum blockchain."

Aragon Connect

• From their introduction (13-7-2020):

"Aragon Connect unlocks the power of DAOs, enabling developers to seamlessly integrate DAO-related functionality in their apps. Enabling your community to incentivize contributors, pool funds, vote over resource allocation... From fetching all the token holders (e.g. members) of a DAO in just 5 lines of code, to getting all the votes in 4 lines of code, Connect is extremely easy to use.
Connect is also blazing fast thanks to The Graph — taking just milliseconds to resolve some queries. It also allows you to point an Ethereum node or even your own TheGraph node — developers can always choose their decentralization threshold!"

Aragon Agent

• From Formal Verification (30-6-2020):

"Allows any DAO to connect to any smart contract deployed on Ethereum. Deploying Agent to a DAO, for example, would allow members of an organisation to lend out their ETH holdings on Compound or open a debt position on MakerDAO. While only being the 5th most installed app (311 installations), the relatively high score for the Argent app shows that it is used by some of the larger and active DAOs."

Dandelion

• MolochDAOs on Aragon (Dandelion orgs) are live (2-2020) on mainnet. Has been audited by Consensys.

Vocdoni

• From CoinDesk (10-1-2021):

Aragon Association, the stewards of a protocol that makes for the easy creation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has announced its acquisition of voting project Vocdoni from Estonia-based Dvote Labs Oü. The purchase was completed in December for an undisclosed price. Vocdoni combines decentralized infrastructure such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) with zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) in an effort to bring democracy into the 21st century.

Roadmap

• Can be found [Insert link here].
• From this article (19-8-2020):

"Under the newly-released governance roadmap, ANT holders will be given more powers in the running of the Aragon Network, creating a fully decentralised and autonomous jurisdiction. The initial phase, which has been dubbed Phoenix, will commence in the coming weeks and will feature the transitioning of executive powers over Aragon Court from the interim council to ANT holders themselves. Following the implementation of the Phoenix phase, ANT holders will have a host of responsibilities; primarily being the ability to enact and amend the Aragon Network agreement. Other governance responsibilities that will fall to ANT holders under the transition will include amending the governance framework of the Aragon DAO and its parameters, governing the workings of the Aragon Court, and governing the network funding pool.

Following the Phoenix phase, the network will transition to the Firebird phase which is aimed at making the network financially sustainable. Leading up to the Firebird implementation, the community will be conducting multiple fund allocation experiments, to determine Firebird’s implementation."

• From Paradigm (12-6-2021):

"Aragon Launches Vocdoni — a decentralized governance platform for traditional organizations. The first instance of the Aragon OpenStack — Aragon Voice — is now live on the Ethereum mainnet. On top of that, Aragon partners with Witnet for gasless DAO management on Discord.

Usage

• Saw (1-2020) early signs of adoption, and by the end of 2019 more than 900 DAOs had been created by the framework.
• "counting (10-2-2020) more than 1,000 DAOs created with $8M under management".

• From Formal Verification (30-6-2020):

"Over 1.4k DAOs have been created on the Aragon network since inception. After the number of dApps waned in mid-2019, the network received new interest towards the end of the year as the introduction of DAO templates meant there was greater flexibility on what kind of DAOs could be created. However, there have only been 93 organisations that have been created on the network in the last two months but it is not exactly clear as to why this is the case (the ongoing legal dispute between Aragon vs Autark might be playing a role).

Perhaps not surprisingly, the top apps installed are Finance (being able to manage financial assets), and tokens (manage the DAOs token supply and distribution)."

Projects that use or built on it

• Saint Fame is built using Aragon. A “decentralized fashion house” DAO.
• Using the 0x protocol, District0x uses Aragon for governance. 0x founder Will Warren also said that they work closely with the Aragon team on governance.

• EthTrader is using Aragon for its DAO (11-9-2020).
• NuCypher uses Aragon for its DAO (18-9-2020).

Competition

• Colony, DAOStack and DAOhaus.
• More info here (5-5-2020).

 Pros and Cons

Pros

• From this interview by the founder of EthTrader who has built its DAO on top of Aragon (11-9-2020):

"Aragon breaks functionality up into apps which exist as separate but connectable components. With the ability to forward intents between these apps it is possible to arrange all kinds of permissioning and fit many different roles. Of course that flexibility comes at the expense of complexity. Despite some complexity I would still say Aragon is an elegant architecture for what it accomplishes . If you’re not familiar with Wordpress, it is a web based tool that powers something like 30% of the web. Aragon is something similar within the DAO world and I expect many will use it for a long time to come."

Team, funding, partners

Team

• Cuende, Luis; Project Leader (Forbes 30 under 30)
• Nerayoff, Steven; executive
• Stefano Bernardi; Executive Director
• “The founding team counts two people and is expected to grow up to ten. The two founders are quite celebrated despite their young age. Project Lead Luis Iván Cuende is a co-founder and advisor to Stampery, a company offering blockchain-based timestamping and security solutions that has been backed by a major venture capital firm Draper Associates and has worked with the Estonian government to implement e-Residency. Cuende was recognized by MIT as one of the Spanish Innovators Under 35 and as one of the 30 under 30 by Forbes.”
• Jorge Izquierdo; former CEO of Aragon One. “Aragon’s Tech Lead Jorge Izquierdo has been building “toy projects” as he puts it such as a mesh network or a small blockchain implementation since 2014. Prior to that he had developed a TV show tracking app Showy that became #2 in the Spanish paid apps ranking and secured its developer a an Apple WWDC scholarship in 2013.” Jorge was one of the people who left Aragon One on 11-1-2021, he did say he would stay on the Association board and in the Aragon community.

• From CoinDesk (10-1-2021):

"[Had] 12 resignations in the greater Aragon ecosystem, one from Aragon Association and 11 from Aragon One. Team members vaguely accused the Association of a lack of transparency in both leadership decisions and with the project’s initial coin offering (ICO) funds."

Funding

• Has given $100K funding to Snapshot (1-10-2020).
• Matter Labs; according to Matter Labs, the founders and leadership of a bunch of DeFi projects, among which this project, joined in on the $50m raise for zkSync (8-11-2021).

Partners

• Aragon and PrimeDAO completed a strategic partnership and token swap totaling $100,000 in $ANT and $D2D (31-10-2022).
• Partner with Bancor, Decentraland & Aion
• Has a partnership with Bancor “With Bancor, all an Aragon organization needs to do is create the smart token in their account and deposit Ether to that account, making the smart token instantly trade-able. Smart tokens built using the Bancor Protocol form an interconnected monetary network that instantly facilitates any request to convert between tokens in the network. The available liquidity will be spread between the different available exchanges, making market depth more shallow, and price volatility higher, in each one.”

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