About Aragon
We build flexible and secure tools for creating, managing, and scaling DAOs, allowing everyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software.
Luis Cuende and Jorge Izquierdo founded Aragon to address emergent societal crises and failures of democracy.
"Aragon Network: A Decentralized Infrastructure for Value Exchange" was published.
The Aragon Network Token (ANT) sale raised 275,000 ETH in 26 minutes. At the time, it was the 4th largest crowdfunding event in history.
The aragonOS, an open source smart contract development framework that can be used by any DAO, dApp, or protocol, was deployed. The architecture was based on the idea of an organization being the aggregate of multiple components (called applications). At the center is the Kernel, which governs how these applications talk to each other and interact.
The Aragon Manifesto: A Pledge to Fight for Freedom was published, along with the viral Fight for Freedom video. The manifesto outlined our goal to provide tools that allow anyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software.
The Aragon community gathered in Berlin for AraCon, an Aragon community conference with speeches about the future of Aragon and governance experimentation.
We launched Aragon Court, a digital jurisdiction and court system. This experiment in a digital court system was the first secure, borderless dispute resolution system for DAOs.
Aragon Client is a UI that taps into the power of aragonOS. With different apps managed via permissions to the kernel, Aragon Client was the big step forward in enabling adaptable organizations on the blockchain.
We launched a grants program that funded teams working to catalyze DAOs and the Ethereum ecosystem as a whole. We funded teams that went on to build Snapshot, DAppNode, Unchain, and Frame.sh.
Aragon Association acquired Dvote Labs OÜ, the company behind Vocdoni, an open source technology stack that enables private, universally verifiable and scalable voting for traditional organizations.
We launched Aragon Voice, a gasless voting platform. Votes were encrypted but universally verifiable on vochain, a chain built by Vocdoni.
We brought together hundreds of developers to build tooling for DAOs in the first DAO Global Hackathon. A prize pool of over $200,000 was distributed amongst 12 winning teams.
We launched the Aragon Network DAO to test our Optimistic Governance stack. We voted on Voice, executed votes in Govern, and resolved disputes in Court. After over a year of experimentation, this project sunsetted in January 2023.
We expanded into Zero Knowledge Proofs to build private, gasless voting. The Aragon ZK Research Guild is focused on ZK research for a future of high scalability and privacy preserving voting systems for DAOs.
DAOs are faced with novel challenges that require a wide range of expertise. So, we partnered with vetted, verified web3 service providers who help DAOs navigate legal, HR, product launches, and much more.
This strategy set the direction for the Aragon Project going forward. A hyperstructure is infrastructure that runs forever without a centralized party needing to maintain it, like the internet. We believe the hyperstructure for governance will be a permission management system.
We transitioned into a delegated voting DAO, governed by ANT Holders. In order to build the best possible products for DAOs, we needed to become a DAO. ANT Holders and their Delegates have a direct say in the direction of the project and its execution.
We launched our new user-friendly tech stack: Aragon OSx and Aragon App (Beta). The OSx was built strategically lean and flexible, enabling the organizations of the future that we can't yet imagine today. The App is a no-code platform for building DAOs quickly and easily.
Aragon is a project building flexible and secure tools for creating, managing, and scaling DAOs, allowing everyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software.
A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is an organization run with smart contracts on a public blockchain.
Decentralized = Built on top of trustless, permissionless technology.
Autonomous = Self-governing with smart contracts at the core.
Organization = Actors coordinating to reach shared objectives.
The Aragon Association is a non-profit entity based in Switzerland. It is a legal steward of the Aragon project, made responsible for managing intellectual property and funds raised in the Aragon Network Token sale. The Aragon Project is governed by ANT Holders in the Aragon DAO and the Aragon Association will progressively and securely transfer the treasury to the Aragon DAO vaults, as security thresholds are met.
Over 3,800 DAOs have been created on AragonOS, including reputable high TVL projects such as Lido, Decentraland, API3, and more.
