Next steps towards the Aragon Network DAO

Hey Aragon community,

In the spirit of transparency, I wanted to write some thoughts about the Aragon Network DAO and its future.

I recently proposed a possible way forward for the ANT-ANJ merger 4, and there were different views by both other community members and Aragon’s co-founder Jorge. I think this is healthy, since decentralized governance cannot happen without public discourse, and I am happy that at least my proposal sparked debate and interest.

As a co-founder, I know my words carry a lot of weight, but I just want Aragon to be successful, so I’m not afraid of withdrawing my proposals if the community comes up with better ones. In fact, I wanted to write this for community members to write their views, even if they are different to mine.

One issue that arose in the ANT-ANJ merger proposal was the ability for the Community Multisig 3 to mint more ANT. The idea was always to have the Community Multisig as the placeholder for the Aragon Network DAO. We have been talking about that DAO for a long time, and about giving ANT holders true control. There has always been a technical reason to postpone, whether it was implementing a new feature, refactoring the system, needing more legal research, etc. Being the leading DAO project, our DAO must of course be excellent. But on the other hand, Aragon looks incoherent spreading DAO usage while not dogfooding its own.

A proposal to get ANT into Aave 1 was also published, but Aave’s co-founder Stani expressed his discomfort about the Community Multisig being able to mint more ANT. Not only Aragon looks incoherent, not having its own DAO, but it is also limiting ANT’s adoption. So I think it would be a good moment to introduce a minimum viable DAO for the Aragon Network.

I’d suggest following the model that some communities are taking to progressively decentralize. That would be deploying an Aragon DAO that would have control over minting more ANT, and then have a multisig (which could be a cryptoeconomics committee elected by ANT holders) that can veto minting events. Then ANT holders might choose to, for example, make ANT inflationary with a predictable supply schedule. Or they might choose to instead cap it and follow a buyback and make model 2. Either way, the cryptoeconomics committee could veto decisions, minimizing the risk of 51% attacks or a malicious takeover. Eventually, the DAO might decide to replace the committee and adopt Aragon Agreements 2.

While I do think that launching a “perfect” DAO showcasing Aragon Agreements, Aragon Protocol and Aragon Govern would be ideal, if we cannot achieve that in the next few weeks, I would propose just adopting Aragon v1. Then the DAO can always decide to transition minting abilities to a new Aragon v2 DAO once ready.

Again, this is not a fully fledged proposal and it doesn’t intend to be. It’s just a few thoughts to kickstart open discussions, hopefully resulting in proposals by community participants.