Aragon Review

Aragon DAO Dashboard

https://github.com/aragon/govern

Deployed on Polygon.

Represented in 2 forms:

  1. Aragon Client — MiniMe ERC20 token has traditional voting governance, templates, and plugins, used for most DAO goals.
  2. Aragon Govern — ERC20 token has a simplified and cost-effective governance structure without voting.

Customization is enabled through apps – sets of smart contracts – which can be installed or removed from DAOs via voting.

Aragon Apps

  • Tokens – to manage membership and voting power, add members, minting, and assign a token to them. This app behavior depends on the organization category (Company, Membership, Reputation); tokens could be transferable or non-transferable.
  • Voting
  • Aragon – enables interaction with other smart contracts on Ethereum. Optional.
  • Finance

Solutions

  • Aragon Voice (beta) – gasless and universally verifiable voting solution. Proposals are processed on Aragon’s layer 2 protocol (Vochain), and vote metadata is stored on IPFS. The result is a completely permissionless, decentralized, and highly scalable governance solution for DAOs and other initiatives using ERC-20 tokens (with more token types coming).
  • Aragon Court – dispute resolution protocol that handles subjective disputes that smart contracts cannot solve. This is achieved by having a set of guardians drafted for each dispute who will vote to guarantee a certain ruling.
  • Aragon Govern (beta) – a framework for frictionless DAO governance with on-chain execution and plug-in dispute resolution.
  • Vocdoni – voting security solution powered by an auditable, censorship-resistant, and anonymous digital voting protocol.

Aragon is using Polygon, which brings more than a 5000x reduction in the cost of DAO creation, from well over $500 on Ethereum to around $0.1 on Polygon.

Treasury

In fact, there are currently 3 highlighted by Aragon: ANT, ANJ, and ARA. ANT is the token central to the Aragon network and is used for the governance of the network.

ANJ is an ERC-20 token that is used for staking and jury duty rewards with the Aragon Court and is bonded to ANT, wherein ANT tokens are deposited into a smart contract to mint ANJ tokens. ANJ tokens can actually be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges (albeit with low volume and quite a low price).

Both ANJ and ARA are referred to as Continuous Tokens since their supply is tied to something called a Bonding Curve smart contract which creates pre-defined exchange rates between ANJ and ARA tokens based on their current price and supply. Every protocol (not DAOs) within the Aragon network will have its own native token which is bonded to ANT in this manner.

Major Aragon DAOs

  • mStable
  • 6Ef0c0b0
  • 4c4bf6a8
  • Airalab DAO
  • Aragon Network Budget
  • pNetwork
  • Aragon Trust
  • f25f0531
  • dxDAO
  • Aragon One

Aragon Pricing

There isn’t a price. You can use the Aragon solutions for free.

Interesting Points

  1. At least 51% of the votes had to support the proposal for it to pass, at which stage a smart contract would unlock funds from the Aragon treasury. Although the treasury is custodied by the Aragon Foundation, funds can only be unlocked by community vote;
  2. In the Aragon Court, all parties who want to participate as jurors, plaintiffs, or defendants must put down a minimum stake of 10 000 ANJ tokens (more on this in the next section). A plaintiff must wager stake to take an issue to ‘court.’ If the defendant does not respond within a certain timeframe, the plaintiff automatically wins, and the defendant loses their stake;
  3. Jurors are pseudo-randomly selected from the pool of ‘activated’ participants (those who staked funds) of the Aragon Court to rule on any given dispute, with the likelihood of being selected as a juror being influenced (not determined) by the number of staked tokens and previous juror reputation;
  4. Juror decisions are made independently and anonymously and involve a principle referred to as “plurality.” Put, jurors are incentivized to make the “correct” (majority) judgment as “incorrect” (minority) jurors lose their stake;
  5. Conversely, jurors who made the correct decision earn rewards in ANJ tokens taken from the lost stake of the defendant and incorrect jurors (if there were any). Defendants can appeal a judgment by putting down more stake, at which point the same process repeats with a larger pool of jurors.

Summary

Aragon is the largest platform for creating DAOs with a large range of modules, and has a well-structured, extensive, and understandable knowledge base; you need to use a similar approach to create documentation.