Aragon Launches on Ethereum Mainnet: Killer Application of DAOs

Aragon version 0.6 is now live on the Ethereum mainnet and the release comes seven months after the company announced Aragon version 0.5.

The release is considered a major milestone for Aragon, a blockchain startup that managed to raise €25 million in under 1.5 minutes during their ICO.

Aragon is a tool, that allows entrepreneurs, blockchain communities and developers to create and manage DAOs. But, unlike previous Ethereum tools, the open source tools of Aragon are more advanced and enable the management of more robust organizations.

More about Aragon DAOs

The idea of DAOs is to create autonomous organizations without any form of hierarchical management by running hard coded rules on top of blockchain platforms. To this end, a DAO is simply a complex set of smart contracts where the by-laws and token governance rules of the organization are embedded into the smart contract.  Autonomous organizations are virtual, efficient but still allow for human collaboration while by-passing controlling legal systems. All transactions are executed on the underlying blockchain through smart contracts.

With the launch of Aragon 0.6, Alba, more robust DAOs can be created on the Ethereum mainnet with minimum fuss. Several Aragon organizations such as the company’s Survey App and DAppNode, have been running on the Ethereum mainnet in the last six months without facing any security or technical glitch.

The Benefits of Aragon DAO

This mainnet launch ushers in a period of improved human collaboration where entrepreneurs get access to greater features and interact with the ecosystem with improved user interface. Aside from the features, Aragon organizations enable seamless collaboration between investors as venture capital firms or community members plugging into the Aragon organizations have a common user interface to cooperate.

Developers desirous of creating governable applications can quickly make use of Aragon’s tested permission and proxying setups via AragonOS which provides a robust API for Aragon DAO integration. To avoid security lapses, AragonOS has been audited and is currently in version 4.

Aragon merges all features of a traditional company including voting, governance, administration and even identity. For full functionality, Aragon is made up of a card-based voting system for collaboration, a token manager allowing for membership and organization ownership and a transparent finance option enabling Aragon DAOs to own assets. Apart from the upgraded user interface, permissions infuse dynamism and allows for creation of customizable organizations.

Momentum is picking up and Space Decentral, a decentralized platform for devising and funding the next-generation space initiatives while linking scientists, astronauts and engineers, is using Aragon.

The Successful ICO and Set of Users

After a successful ICO back in July 2017 when they sold 70 percent of all their ANT tokens, Luis Cuende believe that three main users will begin using Aragon:

 The first people that will interact with Aragon is blockchain projects that will use the platform to govern their products, we already have many in line, waiting to start using it.  The second wave of users will be open-source projects, where people can contribute to open-source projects and pay/reward with tokens of the project to get governance over the product being built. Until now, monetization of open-source has been hard, we hope to change that. The third wave will be distributed companies that can for example easily pay their employees in the Ethereum tokens.

Even as companies begin creating DAOs, Aragon Foundation is encouraging users not to store large amounts of fund for security reasons. A bug bounty program is in progress.