DAO Masters

Overview

What is it?

Deploy a prebuilt Aragon organization leveraging templates for the most common use cases in as little as five minutes. Modular apps enable ongoing DAO management. Aragon consists of several products: Aragon Client, Aragon Govern, Aragon Court, Aragon Voice, and Vocdoni.

What problem does it solve?

Spinning up a DAO can be a complex and intimidating process, even for technical and/or crypto-native users.

Aragon provides users with pre-built, modular templates and apps to make launching and managing a DAO easier and more accessible.

How does it work?

Users select from a suite of templates and populate pre-specified parameters to quickly set up a DAO. The product suite includes:

Aragon Client: Implements a template-based DAO framework
Aragon Govern: Implements an “Optimistic DAO” framework. In this framework, instead of requiring a community to vote on every single proposal, Optimistic DAOs continuously execute actions unless otherwise challenged. This is valuable because reaching quorum on votes is a common DAO challenge. There is a delay period before proposals are executed to allow members to challenge proposals. Challenged actions are managed by the Aragon Court, a subjective dispute resolution system.
Aragon Court: Aragon DAOs can integrate with Aragon Court, a plug-in arbitration platform. Once a dispute is created, a seven day waiting period commences in which evidence may be submitted to be later reviewed by Guardians. These guardians handle subjective disputes and stake a token (ANT) which allows them to earn fees for successfully adjudicating disputes.
Aragon Voice: Enables gasless and universally verifiable voting. Proposals can be processed on Aragon's layer 2 protocol (Vochain) while voting metadata is stored on IPFS. Aragon Voice only supports ERC-20 tokens but plans to add more token types.

Modular apps allow for ongoing DAO management. The Tokens app is used to manage membership and voting power in an organization. The Voting app allows users to see all open and closed votes and can be used to start a new vote or poll token holders about an issue. The Finance app is used to manage the financial resources of an organization. The Agent app enables Aragon DAOs to interact directly with any other smart contract on Ethereum rather than nominating a trusted DAO member to interact with an Ethereum smart contract on the DAO’s behalf.

How do I use it?

DAO Masters Insights

Why it's cool:

Aragon’s template-based design allows non-technical users and those that are new to the space to launch a DAO without having to understand code or governance design.

Aragon actually began as a decentralized dispute resolution protocol and is one of the only DAO frameworks to incorporate such a mechanism.

Challenges:

Pre-built templates and end-to-end frameworks can be more challenging to customize to your DAO’s specific needs.

Words of advice:

You’ll probably still want to consult legal counsel about the regulatory and legal complexities of launching a DAO in your particular jurisdiction since Aragon is less focused on compliance specifically than some other frameworks.