2024 will be the year of Aragon. With a new CEO, a restructured team, and a plan to get back to doing what we do best — building innovative technology — the team is energized and ready to solve the key challenges facing DAOs in 2024 and beyond.
Our mission is to: enable onchain organizations to experience governance at the speed of software.
We see governance at its core as the process of making and implementing binding decisions. In a traditional political judiciary, these decisions are codified in law and enforced through an authoritative system – often using force. Our vision is a world where humans can coordinate through a code base, reducing the need for enforcement through the threat of violence.
It is recognized that we are far from that vision and that connected organizations face many challenges. Their needs are diverse and technically complex, and mistakes can be disastrous. Because they are at the forefront, they need to constantly change in order to survive. We as tool providers need to expand beyond meeting the current needs that DAOs have today, by building infrastructure for them that is future-proof and meets the demands of tomorrow.
We joke that our job is to enable governance at the speed of using software, not writing software! The speed at which governance models can adapt and evolve is a problem we are hungry to overcome. Aragon is not here just for a quick win, but for a radical shift in how humans are governed.
Our new technology suite, Aragon OSx and Aragon App, solves these challenges and advances our mission.
We, the Aragon X team, are focusing our attention on the following initiatives for 2024:
1. Low/no cost on-chain voting: DAOs are secured not only through smart contracts, but also through the participation of their members. Voting on the mainnet is still very expensive, as most DAOs want it to be deployed. We have to reduce the cost of on-grid voting so that anyone can participate, even if gas prices rise on the main grid
There are multiple paths to reduce voting costs and maintain the security of on-chain transactions. The first is to incorporate blockchains specifically designed for auditable and censorship-resistant voting at scale. The other is to integrate our Multichain Governance plugin into the Aragon app, allowing voters to vote for a few cents on L2 while allowing the DAO to live on L1, thus maintaining the benefits of increased security and liquidity. Both options could allow for near-zero gas costs, and could be completely taken away from voters.
We as an industry need to stop taking shortcuts by moving procedures that should be on-line or off-chain. By moving voting off-chain, we erode the values offered by blockchain and open the door to greater censorship and manipulation, something blockchain and especially Ethereum were created to reduce. If we can provide on-chain voting at low or no cost, we can finally unleash the enormous potential of DAOs and their safety.
2. Modify the user interface (Aragon application): There is currently no single user interface for the DAO platform that provides a human-friendly performance experience for the DAO governance experience. Today’s DAO user experience is a fragmented, cross-platform experience – some things off-chain, others online with “trusted” deliveries – often requiring programming expertise.
Our plan is to increase the modularity of the Aragon application, enabling creators to launch a custom DAO without writing a single line of code and interact with it all from one place. Any DAO should be able to:
- Its ruling changes over time.
- You have multi-stage proposals that move across multiple boards.
- Have multiple boards involved in the proposal in parallel.
- Define separate proposal types with their own management processes and well-defined permissions, allowing different processes to provide checks and balances that protect and secure the DAO.
We also aim to continue iterating on Aragon OSx’s permission management system and make it increasingly accessible to everyone in the Aragon app. We want to make it easier for DAOs to define and change permissions in the future with the same precision they would have if they were working directly with Aragon OSx contracts.
3. DAO Customized Services: DAOs have unique needs. When we talk to DAOs, rarely are two people trying to overcome the same problem with the same solution. There are a lot of considerations – anything from legal design to regulatory design to everything in between. All of these decisions can have a material impact on their future. That’s why we started DAO Consulting and Development Services. We already have a lot of interest and are building several custom DAOs for multi-billion TVL projects, and we intend to scale our capabilities to ship more of these custom DAOs as demand increases, so feel free to reach out to us today!
4. Your DAO, your code: Currently, creating DAO contracts and custom UIs is expensive in terms of cost and developer time. It is an opportunity cost, when instead, projects can focus on what they are good at – developing their own technology. That’s why we now offer a custom “build it yourself” development experience. It should be cheap, fast, and as low-maintenance as possible, so your developers can get back to working on your product.
To do this, we’ve launched a new, clean, scalable UI for any project that wants to create a DAO with custom governance requirements beyond what currently exists in the industry, and we already have a few DAOs testing it. One such governance design implemented with fork UI is optimistic dual governance, which gives key stakeholders veto power while allowing core teams to work efficiently. We’ll be sharing more about this soon, so stay tuned!
In short, by the end of 2024, it will be very easy and very cheap to run your Aragon DAO – no matter how complex your governance design – all on-chain, and all in a single UI. You will end up using 5 or 6 tools and platforms to meet your needs.
This is just a glimpse of what we’re working on in 2024, and we’re excited to see what unfolds throughout the year!
If you have questions, some ideas to share, or want to follow this journey: