Launch of Aragon Nest

Aragon -

Grants program is open for submissions

At the end of 2017 we presented Aragon Nest to the community and encouraged people to start coming up with ideas for the launch.

In that blog post, Introducing Aragon Nest, we outlined the reasons and goals of the program.

Now the time has come to launch the program. Submissions are now open for teams to request funding as well as come up with proposals for grants.

For developers that are looking for ways to contribute to a promising project, Aragon Nest represents a great opportunity. The grant program serves as another example of the Aragon team working to catalyze activity around both the Aragon and Ethereum platforms, and doing so in a perfectly transparent manner — Chris Burniske

Together with Placeholder, Aragon will be providing funding for several projects. We're looking to attract talent to research and build the necessary tooling to develop solutions around Aragon and Ethereum.

But it won't be just Aragon and Placeholder that will be deciding the recipients of grants. We need the help of the community to determine which requests are going to be receiving funding! The community at large are those who need these solutions. Either to develop their own product or to use one of them. In the end, they are the ones who these grants are going to help.

The amount of work and research to be done in terms of development tools, crypto education, scalability, off-chain computation and aragonOS apps is crazy. Luckily, we can now support an emergent community willing to help making it all a reality! — Luis Cuende

After publishing the Introducing Aragon Nest post we got a lot of attention from the community. We want to say thank you to everyone who joined us at the Aragon Chat #nest channel, asking questions and giving us feedback about the program. Many expressed interest in finding out more details about the program. Now with the imminent launch of the program, we're ready to start providing further information and details about participating in the program.

For people looking to get funding for their project

To those working or who want to work on something that may be of interest for providing a grant

How do I find out if my project could be eligible for a grant?

Proposals should abstractly describe problems or products, not their implementations

I'm working on something that already has an existing proposal

If there's a proposal that fits into what you're building

  • Fork the Aragon Nest GitHub repository
  • Create a new directory with your project's name inside the grants folder.
  • Inside that, create two files, team.md and roadmap.md, where you present your team and suggested roadmap
  • Create a Pull Request to merge your submission into the Nest repository. In that Pull Request, be sure to fill in all the relevant info described in the Pull Request Template

For people who have an idea that could benefit the ecosystem

How to submit a proposal for a grant?

  • Make sure the Proposals for grants doesn't have an existing proposals for something similar to your proposal. If there is an existing one that is close to your idea, join in the discussion of that Proposal to see if yours could be integrated into the existing one, or if you should create a new proposal
  • If nothing similar exists, create a new Proposal for grants at the Nest Repository and fill it out in detail following the Issue Template

Who will be deciding on how the grants are distributed?

The funding will be described in the Proposal of the grant. The total amount, how many portions will it be divided into, timetable and milestones will be up for discussion.

Placeholder and Aragon are the ones making the initial decisions. But as soon as the Aragon Voting app and it's accompanying signaling mechanism is ready, the community will have the final decision on which proposals are granted funding.

How will the funds be released to the grantees?

All payments will be made in cryptocurrencies. The grants will be paid in ETH and released in portions according to the agreed roadmap which the team has submitted in their proposal. A possible reward depending on milestone completion will be given in ANT to reward value created for the Aragon Network.

What will the Nest program provide to grantees besides financial backing?

Aragon is a very reputable name in the community. We have always stood by our values and the interests of the community. We have developed a lot of best practices of how crypto projects should be ran, and we want to help expand those as much as possible.

Placeholder has years of experience in evaluating crypto projects and teams. They've seen many different instances of what works, and what doesn't. They will help the projects on avoiding common mistakes and on building an open source project on a sustainable premise.

We're in a privileged position to push forward and raise awareness about great, undervalued projects in the space, such as the ones we want to fund with the Nest program.

Who will be participating on deciding the grantees?

Placeholder

Partner at Placeholder, a venture capital partnership based in New York City that invests in decentralized information networks. Prior to Placeholder, Joel led Union Square Ventures' crypto practice and investment efforts. Before joining USV, Joel started and managed the Digital Economy Department within the Ministry of Industry and Commerce of the Dominican Republic, a government office focused on Latin American tech policy and payment system reform.

Chris Burniske is a partner at Placeholder, a venture capital firm based in New York City that invests in decentralized information networks. Prior to Placeholder, he pioneered ARK Invest's crypto efforts, leading the firm to become the first public fund manager to invest in bitcoin in 2015, and co-authored the best selling book, Cryptoassets. His commentary has been featured on national media outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Fortune, and Forbes. Chris graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a BS from Stanford.

Aragon

Luis has been awarded as the best underage European programmer in 2011, is a Forbes 30 Under 30, a MIT TR35 and was an Advisor to the VP of the European Commission.

He cofounded the blockchain startup Stampery. Prior to founding startups, he created the world's first Linux distribution with facelogin.

He also has gained a substantial amount of experience from serving as an advisor to multiple crypto projects

Curious hacker, creator of multiple apps for iOS and macOS. Reached App Store's #2. Always tinkering with new tech. Member of the 2017 class of Thiel Fellows.

Already convinced about the decentralized future of the Internet, he has been building toy projects such as a mesh network or a small blockchain implementation since 2014.

Community

Once we have the Aragon Voting App and a feedback mechanism from the community, all of ANT holders will get to participate in the decision making!

What do Placeholder and Aragon get for supporting projects via the Nest program? Do they get tokens/equity from the grantees?

No! We ask for nothing in return from the grantees outside of delivering the promised solution!

Placeholder and Aragon are both invested into the Aragon ecosystem via ANT and the help from Placeholder is an indication of their involvement as well as a signal of the value they'll add to the ecosystem.

How do I find more information about Nest? Is there a website?

Right now the GitHub repository serves as the main knowledge base about the Nest program.

Applications are now open at https://github.com/aragon/nest

Other resources: