Introducing the Aragon Network
Solving the biggest hurdles to make decentralized organizations widespread
Our first step was to develop an extremely easy to use product on top of the Ethereum blockchain that lets everyone run decentralized organizations. Now we have validated the concept, the market interest and most importantly, the main hurdles to realize our vision.
Those main hurdles to make decentralized organizations widespread are upgradeability and decentralized arbitration.
Making organizations upgradeable is key, so they can last as long as the Ethereum blockchain is up (or even beyond Ethereum). Some sort of automated upgradeability is also a selling point towards mainstream adoption. People that don't want to deal with error prone technical tasks— deploying contracts to the network, being up to date on the security of different Solidity compiler versions, or even knowing what Ethereum is—will be able to run Aragon organizations with the peace of mind that their organizations will always be running the most secure version of the code.
Secondly, providing a way to resolve human disputes that smart contracts don't cover nor understand is a must. Governance mechanisms are really tested when conflicts arise. We want to live in a world with automatic jurisdictions where everyone knows that x will happen after y. Unfortunately, as of right now, encoding all the subtleties of humans doing business in smart contracts is not feasible.
And in the future other hurdles may arise, so we need to provide a way to solve all those issues that require network scale.
That's why we are introducing the Aragon Network.
The Aragon Network (AN) will be the first DAO whose goal is to act as a digital jurisdiction that makes it extremely easy and friendly for organizations, entrepreneurs and investors to operate.
The Aragon Network will let organizations opt-in to it and use the services it'll provide. Moreover, it'll provide a built-in governance system — by using the Aragon Network Token, ANT — so the organizations using it will decide which services are provided, their cost, and other parameters.
The first services we want to provide are automatic contract upgrades and a decentralized court service.
This is how the Aragon Network will work
In a nutshell, it works the following way:
- Org A opts-in into the Network
- Customer A buys something from Org A
- Org A pays the Network a fee derived from that transaction
- The Network mints tokens for Org A
- Org A, or any ANT holder, can now propose and vote on which services the Network should provide. For other possible proposals, see graph above
- Org A, or any other Aragon organization that opted-in, can benefit from those services
- Those services have network-scale. Meaning that if two companies use the court service, the court already has the power to reward/punish them
Today, we are releasing the first public version of the Aragon Network Whitepaper. 25+ people have already peer reviewed it, but we are of course looking for the community's feedback on how we could enhance it.
We look forward to building the Aragon Network, and to partnering with projects in the space that want to be service providers. This will, for sure, be a community effort — and it will take time.