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 (creating innovative technology), the team is energized and ready to solve the key challenges DAOs will face in 2024 and beyond.
Our mission is: Enable on-chain organizations to experiment with governance at the speed of software.
At its core, we see governance as the process of making and enforcing binding decisions. In a traditional political jurisdiction, these decisions are codified in laws and enforced by a trusted system, often using force. Our vision is a world where humans can coordinate according to the rules of the code, reducing the need for law enforcement through the threat of violence.
It is true that we are far from that vision and onchain organizations face many challenges. Their needs are diverse, technically complex and errors can be catastrophic. And, being at the forefront, they need to constantly change to survive. We, as tool providers, must go beyond meeting the existing needs that DAOs have today, by building an infrastructure for them that is future-proof and meets the demands of tomorrow.
We joke that our mission is to enable governance at the speed of using software, not writing software! The speed at which governance models can adapt and evolve is an issue we are eager to overcome. Aragon is not here just to win a quick victory, but to bring about a fundamental change in the way humans rule.
Our new technology stack, Aragon OSx and Aragon App, is solving these challenges and driving our mission forward.
We, the Aragon X team, are focused on the following initiatives for 2024:
1. Low or no cost chain voting: DAOs are not only protected by smart contracts, but also by the participation of their members. It is still too expensive to vote on the mainnet, where most DAOs want to deploy. We need to reduce the cost of on-chain voting so that anyone can participate, even if main grid gas prices rise.
There are multiple paths to reduce voting costs and preserve the security of on-chain transactions. One is to integrate blockchains designed specifically for auditable, censorship-resistant voting at scale. The other is to integrate our multi-chain governance plugin into the Aragon app, which will allow voters to vote for a few cents on an L2 while also allowing the DAO to live on an L1 and therefore maintain the benefits of greater security and liquidity. Both options could allow for near-zero gas costs and could be completely abstracted to voters.
We, as an industry, need to stop taking shortcuts by simply taking actions that should be done on and off the chain. By moving voting off-chain, we erode the values that a blockchain offers and open the door to greater censorship and manipulation, something that blockchains and, in particular, Ethereum, were created to do. If we can send voting on-chain at low or no cost, we can finally unlock huge potential for DAOs and their security.
2. Modularize the UI (Aragón Application): Currently, there is no singular DAO platform user interface that offers an effective, human-friendly experience for experimenting with DAO governance. The DAO user experience today is a fragmented experience across platforms (some off-chain, some on-chain with “trusted” transfers), often requiring coding expertise.
Our plan is to hypermodularize the Aragon application, allowing developers to launch a custom DAO without writing a line of code and interact with everything from one place. Any DAO should be able to:
- Change your governance over time.
- Have multi-stage proposals that go through multiple governing bodies.
- Have multiple governing bodies participating in a proposal in parallel.
- Define independent proposal types with their own granularly defined permissions and governance processes, allowing different processes to provide checks and balances that protect and secure the DAO.
We also intend to continue iterating on the Aragon OSx permissions management system and make it increasingly accessible to everyone in the Aragon app. We want to make it easier for DAOs to identify and change permissions in the future with the same granularity as they would if they worked directly with Aragon OSx contracts.
3. Custom DAO Services: DAOs have unique needs. When we talk to DAOs, there are rarely two trying to overcome the same problem with the same solution. There are many considerations, from legal design to organizational design and everything in between. And all of these decisions could have a material impact on your future. That’s why we have started DAO consulting and development services. We already have a lot of interest and are building several custom DAOs for projects worth billions in TVL, and we intend to expand our capabilities to ship more of these custom DAOs as demand increases, so feel free to reach out! today!
4. Your DAO, your code: Right now, creating custom UIs and DAO contracts is expensive in both cost and development time. It is an opportunity cost, when instead the projects could focus on what they do best: developing their own technology. That’s why we now offer a “build it yourself” custom development experience. It should be as cheap, fast, and maintenance-free as possible, so your developers can get back to working on your product.
To do this, we launched a new clean, forkable 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 some DAOs testing it. One such governance design being implemented with forking UI is optimistic dual governance, which provides key stakeholders with veto protection 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, your Aragon DAO will be extremely easy and affordable to launch and operate, no matter how complex the governance design you have, all on-chain and all in a single user interface. It will be the goal to use 5 or 6 tools and platforms to meet your needs.
This is just a taste of what we’re working on in 2024, and we’re excited to see what develops throughout the year!
If you have questions, some ideas to share, or want to follow this journey:
