Our Intended Use of Revenue

How we plan to use the token sale to drive development

As previously announced, the Aragon Network Token (ANT) sale will be conducted on May 17th. The funds raised will fund Aragon Core development and the Network deployment.

The specific steps and timeline to make Aragon production ready are outlined in our development plan, released last week. In this post, we're excited to provide details on our intended use of revenue from the token sale.

Note that our intended use of revenue is an estimation. Because Ethereum is such a new technology, our allocation of revenue will likely change and adapt overtime.

Developers, Developers, Developers!

Our top priority is to develop a great dApp without bugs. While many startups focus on marketing, we believe that a useful, stable dApp will drive long-term adoption more than any marketing campaign. As a result, the majority of funds raised will be allocated to development.

Specifically, our development budget will be spent employing talented developers and funding audit and bug bounty programs.

Development Focus

Most of the development effort will be focused on Aragon Core — the set of core contracts that power an organization, and the interface to manage them. Because Aragon Core is where new users join, interact, and transact with each other, it's imperative for long-term user adoption that its fully functional and meets and exceeds end-user expectations. A large part of this budget will be used to continue improving the end-user experience and implementing new features.

In addition, it is particularly important that Aragon Core is released bug free. The Aragon Network is essentially a mesh of Aragon Core organizations, and a bug in the release of Aragon Core software could potentially compromise the entire network. As a result, a large portion of the development budget will be used to fund extensive quality assurance efforts. Along with thorough internal testing, we plan to hire third-party auditors and to fund bug bounty programs.

Marketing and Operations

To drive user adoption, we estimate that 12% of funds will be allocated to marketing efforts and continued community outreach. Operations will make up an estimated 17% of our budget (costs to run the Foundation, hiring, etc.)

Contingency Reserve

We also plan to allocate 5% of funds to a contingency reserve. This reserve will be set aside for unforeseen expenses (for example, legal disputes).

The best success metric for a project: The amount of top people that want to work for you.

April 25, 2017

I tweeted the other day when I had 14 high-quality job applications sitting in my inbox. I'm so humbled and amazed to have the opportunity to on-board awesome professionals to help us push Aragon's vision forward.

So, overall, I cannot wait to be able to hire a top-notch team! That's really putting capital to work.

Thanks,

The Aragon Team