Towards Aragon v2

We started working on Aragon four years ago. Since then, many things have changed, but one has stayed the same: the need for decentralized governance to advance humankind with liberating technology.

Since launching on mainnet in 2018, Aragon has managed to become the leading DAO platform, with more than $300M in AUM.

Foreseeing the future is always hard when the technology is evolving so much, which is the case with Ethereum and the crypto space broadly.

After the Aragon Network DAO launches in a few weeks, ANT holders will have power over the future of Aragon. With that, the roadmap outlined in the initial 2017 whitepaper will be complete. As founders, we want to make sure that Aragon is in its best position to face that new era. This is a sneak peek into what we would like to see as founders of the project.

Optimistic DAOs become the standard

Until a few weeks ago, DAO governance always faced the compromise between secure but expensive on-chain voting or non-binding but free polling.

Our recent breakthrough pairing off-chain voting with on-chain execution defines a before and after moment in how we think about governance. It creates the possibility of bundling off-chain voting with optimistic execution — assuming a vote result is correct unless disputed in Aragon Court and proved otherwise. Therefore our recent bet in Snapshot, which will play a fundamental role in pushing DAO adoption.

In the coming weeks, we will be unveiling a new minimalistic governance framework for optimistic DAOs that will serve as the base for Aragon 2.

Because of this breakthrough, we will propose transitioning efforts from building an Aragon-specific chain to doubling down on off-chain scalability and having Aragon on other community chains, like Ethermint or xDai. This would allow us to have the bandwidth to focus on the Snapshot opportunity while supporting other communities like Ethermint or xDai.

Aragon becomes protocol-centric

Aragon Court is a very powerful subjective oracle. We haven’t even scratched the surface when it comes to its use cases. But we do know one extremely useful use case: optimistic DAOs.

The vision that we described just a few paragraphs above is only possible thanks to Aragon Court. It feels like prime time for Aragon Court might be near us. Aragon Court was intended to be just one of the network services, so it received divided attention from the network.

But we think that it makes sense to put Aragon Court at the center of what Aragon does and become central to the Aragon Network.

We envision rebranding Aragon Court to Aragon Protocol and tweak its messaging to make it more appealing for this first use case.

The Aragon Network DAO becomes sovereign

DAOs are all about launching an idea and giving agency to those who can make it happen.

Decentralizing Aragon has always been the goal, and it will mark a before and after for the project. We are so looking forward to launching Phoenix and Firebird.

But there has been so much innovation in token distribution mechanisms and community agency techniques, so we are taking a bit more time to collect and apply these learnings.

What is next

We will share more details about each of the previously mentioned topics and look forward to the community’s feedback. It felt great to look back and learn from the last four years, and it will feel even better to look forward and execute on those learnings! We cannot wait to do so and finally transition power to ANT holders for once and ever.