Aragon DAO Framework

Description

Joshua Tan:

"Aragon is a DAO framework, meaning it’s a tool for implementing DAOs. It’s a software project operating on Ethereum and built in Solidity. It’s a platform, by which we mean it’s a piece of software that hosts online communities.

Aragon the platform is different from the Aragon (user) community, which is again different from the Aragon Foundation. The Aragon community, the Aragon Association, and the Aragon Network DAO are all organizations, but they’re related to Aragon the platform in different ways. The Aragon Association owns Aragon the platform in that it is the legal steward and principal governor of the code, while the Aragon community contributes to Aragon the platform through buying tokens, through voting, and through software commits. The Aragon Network DAO is a formal medium through which the Aragon community votes on proposals.

Finally, Aragon the platform hosts a number of other online communities, not all of which are DAOs."

(https://thelastjosh.medium.com/introducing-govbase-97884b0ddaef)

More information

* Article: A. Peña-Calvin, J. Saldivar, J. Arroyo and S. Hassan, "A Categorization of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations: The Case of the Aragon Platform," in IEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems, 2023 doi: 10.1109/TCSS.2023.3299254.

URL = https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10217072

"Despite experiencing remarkable growth, currently boasting nearly 7M users and 18 billion in assets,DAOs remain relatively underexplored in the existing literature, particularly from an empirical perspective. This study presents a comprehensive framework comprising 15 dimensions to categorize DAOs based on their operational domain, purpose, scope, voting process, and utilization of crypto−tokens. By applying this categorization schema to 40 DAO communities hosted on the Aragon platform, encompassing over 423000 participants and managing treasuries worth 960M, we shed light on the prevailing characteristics of these DAOs. Contrary to assertions made by blockchain enthusiasts, our analysis reveals that DAOs predominantly operate in financial and technological domains, primarily offering blockchain-based services. Additionally, our investigation into their governance structure exposes limitations in terms of democratic participation, as decision-making power typically correlates with the number of tokens owned by the voter, resembling plutocracies rather than true democracies."