Building the Hyperstructure for Governance: Aragon’s New Strategy

The Aragon Association is pursuing a strategy developed over the course of many months of stakeholder consultations, feedback from team members and ANT holders, and work from the core team. The first release, v1.0.0, can be viewed in this Github repo. It will be versioned there and considered a work in progress throughout the DAO transition and beyond.

While developing the strategy, the following vision was extracted from the manifesto and agreed upon by key stakeholders: “to provide the most flexible and secure tools for creating and managing decentralized organizations, allowing everyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software.”

In order to realize that vision, we seek to build the hyperstructure for governance. A hyperstructure is infrastructure that runs forever without a centralized party needing to maintain it, like the internet.

Founder of Zora jacob.eth defines hyperstructures as “Crypto protocols that run for free and forever, without maintenance, interruption, or intermediaries.

He presents this checklist:

“Unstoppable: the protocol cannot be stopped by anyone. It runs for as long as the underlying blockchain exists.
Free: there is a 0% protocol wide fee and runs exactly at gas cost.
Valuable: accrues value which is accessible and exitable by the owners.
Expansive: there are built-in incentives for participants in the protocol.
Permissionless: universally accessible and censorship resistant. Builders and users cannot be deplatformed.
Positive sum: it creates a win-win environment for participants to utilize the same infrastrastructure.
Credibly neutral: the protocol is user-agnostic.”

–Jacob.eth, Hyperstructures

Our strategy includes the steps needed to build the hyperstructure that DAOs use to govern their organizations on-chain.

We believe the hyperstructure for governance will be a permission management system, enabling the collective intelligence of smart contract developers to create the building blocks of governance experimentation.

A permission management system is an on-chain DAO framework used to grant and revoke permissions to plugins and token holders.

For example, a DAO creator would determine how someone can get funds from the treasury by setting permissions: who can vote, how many votes need to be in favor, and how many voters need to be present.

Permission can also be granted to various plugins, such as a streaming plugin to stream tokens to contributors or a multisig plugin to give treasury access to a smaller group. The on-chain entity—the DAO in its purest form—is no more than a permission management system.

We’re building a permission management system because it’s the simple base layer that DAOs need to build on top of.

Our strategic goal is to maximize ecosystem compatibility to unlock powerful and compounding network effects. In order to reach the network effects necessary to fuel a hyperstructure, we will need to bootstrap a two-sided market, which includes:

Developers who build integrations and plugins for Aragon DAOs.
No-code builders who use the integrations and plugins to power their Aragon DAOs.

We aim to put synergistic tools in the hands of both developers and no-code builders. So, we are delivering one protocol and one app, or the base layer and the interface.

For the devs: An OS that makes building integrations and plugins easy, flexible, and simple. This will be our updated modular and flexible aragonOS.
For the builders: The most human-centered app for creating and managing DAOs. This will be our new Aragon App.

But building a hyperstructure won’t be easy. Our plan is to focus on the needs of the next 10,000 DAOs by providing them with a broad range of functionality that includes integrations with some of the ecosystem’s leading projects. Then, we can start a powerful flywheel effect that will carry the aragonOS forward, enabling the governance experimentation we envision.

Our plan of action maps out three strategic horizons :

Get big on new DAOs, focusing on the next 10,000 DAOs
Lead on governance security, focusing on attracting high-TVL web3-native DAOs
Expand use cases, focusing on bringing decentralized governance to traditional organizations

Each horizon is broken down into many initiatives, which you can read in the full document on Github.

Enabling organizations to experiment with governance at the speed of software

If we can enable organizations to experiment with governance as quickly as developers are able to experiment with software, we believe the world’s organizations will be required to change for the better in order to stay relevant. Not only will the entire DAO ecosystem move forward with the learnings of the experimentation we seek to enable, but these learnings can be brought to the world beyond web3. We are excited to continue building technology to better equip the world’s organizations to overcome the existential challenges humanity faces today.

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