The next step after Nest

Aragon Nest was the first grants program launched to fund Ethereum and Aragon initiatives. The only one that predates it is the original Ethereum Foundation's program, which was suspended at the time.

Aragon Nest funded the first Eth 2.0 implementation, pioneered by Prysmatic. Aragon was the first independent institution funding Ethereum sharding, even before it was called Eth 2.0.

In that period of time, all we wanted was to accelerate the Ethereum ecosystem. We spent millions of dollars in grants for that purpose. We also had to develop a bunch of things in-house since Ethereum tooling was nascent.

But we also wanted to accelerate Aragon development. The developer tooling for Aragon was extremely nascent too, and so giving grants was needed to attract its early adopters.

Fortunately, after years of development, we are now going to market. That is less about big lump sum grants with long development sprints and more about fast experimentation.

Better still, things aren’t as nascent as a couple years ago. Ethereum’s tooling is much more advanced now, and so is Aragon’s.

More mature tooling means that more developers can just start building DAOs without our help or traversing a lengthy grant application process.

This year we have been talking to users much more. We have contributed to communities. We have started showing up and offering help. That experience has been invaluable, and that’s the next step we will take.

It’s now less about funding, and more about people. We want to support amazing creators who are empowering their communities with DAOs. We want to help people build a better future for themselves, faster and better than was ever possible before.

While traditional startups build things people want, we are going to help people build communities that people want to be a part of.