Nest Team Interviews: Pando

The second of our Aragon Nest Team Interviews is with Pando who are also working on an open source incentivization app.

With this series, we want to bring forth the teams that have received a grant and funding from the Aragon Nest grants program. Pando, when complete, will be a big step towards decentralization of development for all.

Hello Pando team, happy to have you as a Nest grantee!

Could you tell us in more detail about what is it you're building?

We’re building a decentralized and immutable versioning and cooperation system based on top of IPFS, aragonOS and the ethereum blockchain: Pando. The purpose of Pando is to provide a decentralized alternative to the git / github workflow. Pando is also part of a larger project endorsed by the same team: the Ryhope Network. The Ryhope Network intends to provide creators with an open infrastructure to cooperate, host and link their content and gain an income from their work - even if they release it under open access or open source licenses.

We think such a decentralized Version Control System is needed for a lot a reasons. The GitHub story has shown us what can happen when a whole ecosystem relies on a centralized and private actor. Moreover, we expect Pando to help blockchain projects enforce more openness. For instance, Pando will make it really easy to reward external developers with a bunch of tokens for their contributions.

Pando is still in a very early stage but we are right where we are supposed to be in our roadmap :)
We already have a fully functional staging and branching system working and a basic on-chain access control system. We are now working on some optimizations and on a much more decentralized access control system: all contributors will be able to vote on which contributions to merge depending on the importance / value of their past contributions to the project.

How about your team, what made you come together and what does the future look like to your team?

The core of our team is made of a bunch of friends who were thinking about how to achieve new forms of autonomy and governmentality. We were all rather politicized but frustrated with our politics. As going down in the streets and bumping into authorities to shout our refusal of the established order was not giving anything, we started to embrace other paths. Provocative ones, sometimes a bit crazy, but always full of a meaning that we didn’t find anywhere around us.

And suddenly, the blockchain arrived and opened the horizon we were searching for. Step by step we all found our place and mission in this adventure. We come from very differents fields and that’s what make our team so particular I think. That’s what we love about blockchain - we are all very different and can come from anywhere. Fuck the curriculum is the whole idea I guess. So we’re not all developers in this team but it’s not everyday that you have the chance to meet people who are on to stay awake till daylight to discuss about what the future of blockchain and organizations should look like!

We think Pando will enable a more open collaboration process and a fairer recognition of the contributions of each one. That’s why we expect that in five years the Pando / Ryhope project would have gained enough momentum to let us slowly disappear into the mass of contributors. It’s an essential first step to the success of future DAOs. Besides, building stuff together is the main purpose of what we wish blockchain to be, so a tool that enables that is quite crucial, right?

We really like how Aragon is handling its own decentralization for instance. At one point, we do expect Pando and the Ryhope Network to become regular projects on the Ryhope Network. Which means all contributors - and not just us - will be fairly rewarded for what they bring to the project. That’s why we expect us to become nothing more than a particular team working on Pando / Ryhope amongst many others.

Why build Pando on Ethereum and not some other decentralized platform?

We believe the Ethereum blockchain has already won the blockchain race. There are so many developers, tools, libraries, docs, etc. in the Ethereum ecosystem that any experiment with another blockchain feels like going back several years. So we think the ecosystem should focus on improving the existing Ethereum ecosystem: layer-2 scaling solutions, libraries, etc. Moreover, we like the idea that the Ethereum blockchain enforces a true network-wide consensus - unlike other self-declared Ethereum killer blockchains - even though it comes with some scalability issues. The world is so fragmented right now, we like to think about the Ethereum blockchain as the unity-maker we lack so much :)

And what are your thoughts on Aragon and the Nest grant program?

This Nest initiative is really unique and we can’t thank the Aragon team enough for all the things they enable.

We honestly think that Aragon is one of the most important projects in the ecosystem right now. The aragonOS framework is clearly the most advanced DAO framework and developing dapps on top of it is a real pleasure. Also - and that’s probably more important - we really recognize ourselves in Aragon’s value and ethics. Most of us are based in France and the french blockchain ecosystem is - let’s say - quite finance-focused. Which is sad because most of us came to blockchain due to our «anarchist» past. So working closely with a project like Aragon whose goal is not to make more and more money but to build actual solutions to achieve a more sustainable and fair - and a less state-centric - world was kind of a big deal for us :)

That’s also one of the reasons why we’re so excited about the upcoming Aragon Network Jurisdiction. More autonomy, more open-organizations, more fairness, less states and less corporations: that’s where we expect to go :)

How can people join in and help you build Pando?

We’re still a small team, so any contribution is welcome. It may be technical contributions of course: all of our code is available on GitHub so feel free to test, open issues and submit pull requests. But it can also be less technical contributions: any suggestion about how Pando should work, or any idea of an original use case are welcome.

We do have a small telegram group: https://t.me/Ryhope. Feel free to join in and come to chat!