Aragon launches Survey app on Mainnet

First Aragon app launched on Ethereum Mainnet for community sentiment signaling

Ever since the inception of Aragon, the goal has been for the community members to take part in how decisions affecting the project are made. Our objective of being community governed has thus far required significant efforts in research and development, because governance is hard.

Today we are releasing an entirely new step for community members to signal their sentiment on the project and igniting the next level of participation in the project for all ANT holders.

Survey app is the fourth app developed by our team in addition to the Token Manager, Voting & Finance apps seen previously in Aragon Core v0.5. And the first one to launch on the Ethereum Mainnet.

Important note: We are launching only this app on Mainnet for now. One audit of our contracts has been concluded and another audit is currently underway, in the future we will also audit our frontend components. We are only launching this one app now because the Survey app will never move any of your funds out of your wallet! We strongly urge caution whenever interacting with apps on Mainnet. Make sure the url is correct, check the SSL certificate validity and that your transaction prompt isn't attempting to move your funds from your wallet when interacting with the Survey app!

Signaling to support and establish community sentiment

Understanding which way the ANT holders want the project to be moving is important for us in order to be sure the steps we are taking are in the best interests of the community.

Bringing our Survey app to Mainnet now enables any ANT holder to participate in the surveys we put up in order to get a feel of what the token holders actually want from the project.

For this Survey app v1.0.0 we are still being careful on just how it is used and how important the decisions are that we initially display on it. This is due to certain limitations this first version has, for example, there is no easy and user friendly way to participate if your tokens are stored in a hardware wallet. But these are things that we will improve upon in future iterations of the app. Also, for now, only our team members will be able to create new surveys and will retain veto power over all decisions before we begin shifting the power over the project gradually to the community.

Community members are invited to suggest new surveys at https://github.com/aragon/governance/issues/ by creating new Aragon Governance Proposals.

Even though there currently are limitations with they Survey app at this point, we can see far reaching implications with this.

For example, the Ethereum community has been actively discussing and trying to figure out how to best gauge community sentiment. With the Aragon Survey app, in the future, we can deploy a version where ETH holders may create surveys and receive signals as to how that particular community wants to address issues within the community.

But with that we already run into issues like who gets to create new surveys, how do we protect the privacy of the participants, how are the surveys ordered in the UI, how long should a single survey run for, should there be a limit as to how many active surveys there can be at a given time, how do we make sure that developers enact the survey results in their work etc. As I said, governance is hard.

We already have a varied group of projects and people who have committed to working together on addressing and creating governance solutions for Ethereum. And we recently launched our own Aragon Research forum for people interested in tackling these issues together with us.

Now we have a tool for the community to signal their interests and opinions on matters, but we still also have a lot of work ahead of us. Join us on this journey and let's make decentralization and governance happen, together!

How does the Survey app work

This is currently quite easy and straightforward, with using MetaMask or a similar web3 wallet or dapp browser that can hold ERC20 (ANT) tokens and sign transactions on the Mainnet.

Head on over to

https://survey.aragon.org

See what surveys are currently open, click on Vote and pick how you want to cast your vote for that survey.

You'll then be able to submit your vote by signing the transaction, and after the transaction has been mined, it is logged into the survey results.

How is my token balance calculated for the survey?

The app gets the ANT balance of the Ethereum address you are using to vote on a survey based on the balance that account held one block before the survey was created. The ANT will not leave your account, but you will need some Ether to pay for the transaction gas to submit your vote.

This makes the survey resistant to double-voting so that you can't move your balance around in order to try to vote multiple times with the same tokens. It does also introduce the issue so that you can only use an account that had a token balance in the past, and if you would like to increase your voting power for a given survey, that is not currently possible.

Are survey results binding?

No, we want to empower ANT holders to create signals that are non-binding in order to experiment with community governance at this stage.