Announcing Aragon Govern
We released aragonOS on mainnet in 2018. Since then, aragonOS has secured more than $300m and powered more than 1,500 DAOs.
aragonOS put special emphasis on power-users, who could leverage a wide range of permission settings to customize their DAO. But that came at the expense of developer friendliness. After all, aragonOS would be akin to the Linux kernel for DAOs, and not many developers adventure themselves to touch a kernel! aragonOS has no less than 5,000 lines of Solidity code. That’s a lot of Solidity!
Having more code and achieving more power-user customizability also meant a more expensive system for DAO users — each transaction hops through many OS components in order to be executed.
A month ago we announced our breakthrough in achieving off-chain voting with on-chain execution. Since then, we have seen crazy demand from both our existing users and new users for a governance solution like that.
Today, we are happy to unveil that solution: Aragon Govern. And it’s live on mainnet as a developer preview.
Aragon Govern showcases our learnings from aragonOS, and specifically Aragon Agent. It also leverages the incredible potential of Snapshot for off-chain voting and Aragon Court for on-chain vote enactment. That’s why we call Govern-powered DAOs optimistic — since thanks to Aragon Court, voting doesn’t need to happen on-chain at all.
Aragon Govern is a developer-focused DAO framework. When we say developer-focused, we truly mean it. It’s just 500 lines of code. That’s an order of magnitude less than aragonOS. It also works with TheGraph — soon with Aragon Connect too — and can be integrated into any Web2 user experience.
It’s also compatible with ERC 3k, the up-and-coming governance standard.
Although Aragon Court is used to secure the on-chain enactment of votes, Govern is also interesting for projects which are venturing into further decentralizing but still desire a multisig to have veto powers for the moment.
We are launching Govern’s codebase and documentation today, alongside with its first developer preview version. We are inviting developers and DAO architects to play with it and send us feedback. Please note that it’s a developer preview, so it’s not a stable version and it hasn’t been audited. Please don’t risk funds with it just yet. We will announce a stable version soon.