Common court with Kleros proposal

Hi Aragon community!

In this proposal, we propose to have the Kleros and Aragon community work together for their court system. Kleros already uses Aragon for governance. Aragon has expressed its intent to create a court similar to Kleros.

Given that both projects are working on a similar technical development, it is in the interest of both parties to collaborate instead of duplicating efforts

We propose to have Aragon and Kleros join their efforts in building/improvement of their court system and its ecosystem.

Note that this is a basis document and can be amended.

Iā€™m in Berlin Blockchain week up to the 26 so we can even discuss face to face for the people who are there.

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I am a big fan of kleros. I think I was one of the first people in the slack group, and I participated in the iico. Tete is also one of the first friends I made on the crypto space.

Itā€™s evident that both Kleros and Aragon teams share the same court system vision. At this early stage of the ecosystem it seems more reasonable to pool both teams resources together rather than building/improving two similar systems in parallel.

I echo this sentiment. That being said I would have loved to see this AGP a lot earlier before significant work had been made on the Aragon court

The only significant change would be to charge a subscription fee to organizations using the court even without disputes.

For the Aragon use case, the current proposed fee structure makes more sense IMO.

Competition is good when different products compete with each other as it gives people more choices and leads to better products more likely to ā€œwinā€ the market. But here, competition of similar products would just distract resources from both teams ā€œfightingā€ each other for market share on grounds which are not product related.

As I understand it while the potential functionality of both systems is similar, Aragonā€™s implementation is focused on agreements between Aragon DAOs and members/contributors/service providers. Kleros wouldnā€™t naturally fight for those users

Centralized platforms often use an attract-extract strategy.

As I see it, this analogy of Aragon and centralised platforms is not apt. Aragon dose does not compete with its users, it may compete with kleros but kleros is only one user.

Furthermore, it was the goal from the v1 whitepaper to have jurisdiction for DAOs with a court system at its heart. Kleros should have been aware of this well before its launch. So to suggest Aragon lured kleros in and is now trying to extract value is not right

For Aragon, network effects among DAOs are not currently strong enough to control the ecosystem, so users are not bound to stay on Aragon. If Aragon were to compete with them, they could migrate their governance to other DAO platforms (DAOstack, MolochDAO forks or even develop their own) in order to avoid reinforcing a competitor. This would also scare would-be users, as even if Aragon does not act as a competitor now, it could be in the future if it has a history of doing such things.

This also seems very kleros specific and not generalisable to Aragon users as a whole. As mentioned above Aragon may compete with kleros because a court system is an essential service for DAOs and key to prevent 51% attacks. I donā€™t see this scaring off potential users at all, especially as it was communicated right from the beginning. IMO we should not make a decision on core infrastructure based on veiled threats to move to another platform

On alternative platforms, they will all compete on merit. I definitely see room for them. However all the USPs of those platforms will be available within Aragon and have the benefit of modular architecture. For sure Moloch forks have something Aragon cannot compete with, very small codebase.

If projects want to benefit from an ever-growing functionality Aragon apps provide, they will choose Aragon

A part of the 50% for further sales would be minted to be put in an ANT bonded curve (this could use some of the work of Aragon Black on batched bonded curves). To avoid gas wars, there will be some initialization period for this bonded curve where everyone can deposit ANT. In exchange, Aragon would provide a mix of ETH/DAI/ANT. This can be provided to Kleros cooperative or to the Kleros DAO (using Aragon fund management module). The ETH/DAI would guarantee funding of Kleros improvements and of the ecosystem.

Iā€™m a little confused by this.

  • Does this refer to the ANT/ANJ bonding curve?
  • How does this benefit ANT holders?
  • If PNK is used as collateral in ANJ courts does this not reduce the utility ANT?
  • If PNK and ANT are both used to mint ANJ, Why would ANT holders pay for kleros for this? ANJ is increasing the utility of PNK and earning potential of PNK holders.

In conclusion, Iā€™m in favour of closer collaboration. As mentioned in the AGP, both communities are very aligned and it makes sense to have more eyes on this critical piece of infrastructure. However I will be voting no to this proposal in itā€™s current form. I do not understand this proposed token model and itā€™s value to Aragon seems a little difficult to reason about. I am in favour of Kleros being a service provider (helping with further development of the court) with a clearer remuneration policy like the rest of the flock/nest teams

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We contacted the Aragon One team more than 2 years ago in April 2017 way before any of the projects went in production. This AGP has been sent to Aragon One team for review and counter proposal 2 months ago. So we did not wait last minute to make some proposals.

It is perfectly possible, to have a subscription fee for DAO usages while keeping a dispute only fee structure for other usages.

Well if the Aragon One team were to do a Kleros re-implementation with its own token, that would be competition to one of its major user. This would means that other people building on Aragon are at risk, that if what they are building is successful, Aragon would re-implement it to put their own token instead.

The Original Aragon whitepaper had a really different court proposal.
If Aragon One were to implement the original whitepaper proposal, this would just be a competition on the dispute resolution space, which I would not see as a problem (they are a few other projects with other dispute resolution ideas and itā€™s fair game) and could be good for the ecosystem as different mechanisms were to be tried. However, the current plan of Aragon One is not to develop a competing solution, but to re-implement Kleros which is completely different compared to just competing in the space.
At the beginning Aragon One only planed to make a Kleros fork to be used by Aragon, so this did not seem problematic for Kleros, but now, Aragon One proposals are to make a general court which both have the same mechanism and the same target market.

There are no veiled threats I think itā€™s obvious that if there were to be a re-implementation of Kleros, with an Aragon token, on the same market, that would make us competitors and it would not make sense for Kleros to support a competitor compared to working with a platform with a mutually beneficial relationship.
This paragraph was about which message it would show to other Aragon users Kleros has no control of.

Yes, the proposal is to have a ANT/PNK bonded curve instead. There as a significant amounts of PNK which are not minted yet which can be put on the curve. Of course, that means that PNK are not only given to people swapping ANT, but Kleros usecases extends beyond DAO disputes, so this would give ANT holders a lower share of bigger cake (which I believe would lead them to have more cake overall :cake:).

ANT holders get:

  • If they put ANT in the curve: PNK which will have the current use of PNK + planned ANJ use. It would be more resistant to attacks compared to having 2 separated systems. It would have more network effects.
  • If they donā€™t put ANT in the curve: That reduces effective supply of ANT in a fashion similar to burning/staking mechanisms.

No, because ANT can be swapped for PNK, and PNK would have more uses (for Aragon disputes and disputes in other dapps connected to Kleros) and network effects than ANJ would have had alone. The dispute resolution system would also be better overall due to increased collaboration between the Kleros team and Aragon teams.

The proposal is not to use PNK and ANT to mint ANJ. But to use ANT to mint PNK which can then be used in a single dispute resolution system encompassing current and future Kleros uses-cases in addition of Aragon Court ones.

In this case, could you make another proposal?

Basically ANJ and PNK are merged. ANT holders can get PNK in a similar fashion as they could get ANJ in the current Aragon Court proposal. They benefit from a smaller share of the token pool compared to current Aragon solo court proposal, but they benefit from more usecases (current usecases of Kleros and future ones), a team fully dedicated to improvements of decentralized courts, a team making integration with partners, larger network effects, better resistance against 51% attacks (itā€™s easier to 51% attack a small token, compared to a larger one being a merger of two tokens).
Overall, itā€™s a smaller share of larger cake. It would be the same reasonning for PNK holders as some PNK would be minted for ANT holders swapping their tokens to PNK. And what should mater is not the share of the cake in %, but the actual amount of cake you have.

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What was the outcome of this? Was a counter-proposal made? This proposal is not late in fact it is very early in the ANV a cycle (which I do appreciate as it means there is more time for constructive feedback and a better chance of a mutually beneficial outcome) but Ultimately this is a community governed project. It would have been nice for the community to have itā€™s said before A1 started development.

Aragon and kleros are both opensource software projects. While it would be ideal if there was a solution for Aragon to use kleros directly, this has to be mutually beneficial. I am not an expert on the court system but as I understand it, the Aragon court is not simply kleros with ANT swapped out for PNK. But more to the point, Aragon made it clear it that it would implement a court system. Kleros use of the Aragon platform has nothing to do with the decision to fork Kleros as the base for its own court system. If kleros decided to use DAOstack for governance, it would still be a good idea to fork kleros. I donā€™t follow the logic that other projects would be at risk because of their use of the Aragon platform. Maybe you could explain this a bit more for me.

This is normal, plans change. Aragon was a platform for digital companies, now itā€™s a generalised framework. of course, the vision for the court would evolve too. This doesnā€™t change the fact a court system was always the plan from the beginning. Furthermore, it was always more than that. Aragon Network was always to be a digital jurisdiction. Thanks to kleros open-source software itā€™s one step closer to that :slightly_smiling_face:

Again, youā€™re going to have to walk me through this logic. If kleros used Aragon or another platform, what has that decision got to do with the decision to fork kleros? And again we are talking about OSS.

Ok, I understand the proposal now. But for me as a ANT holder I would definitely be voting NO to this for the following reasons

  1. The utility of ANT right now is very limited. Only people interested in the governance of the network need ANT. This is a very small set of developers and community members. As the network grows this will increase but it will remain a niche use case. The Aragon court is something most active organisations will subscribe to and thus boost the utility and price significantly. as an ANT holder, ANJ is fundamental to the utility ANT
    Right now the total market cap of PNK is about 1.7 million dollars if organisations only need PNK for arbitration services, this would mean kleros and PNK would benefit much more than ANT holders. Why would a user buy ANT and swap it for PNK when they can just pick up some very cheap PNK?

No, because ANT can be swapped for PNK

So can ETH, DAI, BTC or any other token. That dose not give utility to ANT any more than it does any other token.

  1. For sure using one court would boost the network effects, but Aragon being a platform for DAOS and smart contract governance is in a great position to grow its jurisdiction on its own and capture that value for its token holders

  2. Most importantly, ANT holders will be in control of the Aragon court and its development. We would be giving up that control of a vital piece of our infrastructure.

As you know, a proposal of this magnitude requires a lot of thought. But for me, any proposal would have ANT holders more control and not less. Not sure exactly how that would look of the top of my head but all flock teams, even A1 have are accountable to ANT holders, kleros, of whoever is developing core infrastructure would have to be too.

Maybe kleros and Aragon do a DAO merger with the kleros team becoming a flock team. maybe kleros work on the Aragon implementation. Maybe something else. In any case, I want to see value and control flowing to ANT holders not away.

Kleros is a great project and you guys have done an amazing job. And again I am a stakeholder in both projects and want both to succeed.

I first discussed with people of the Aragon One team. Some people brought some ideas of collaboration (including a token model which is functionally equivalent to the one proposed there).
However someone at the highest level of Aragon One cancelled the scheduled meeting and stopped answering, I only got an answer now because we were in the same place all the week (Berlin blockchain week).
The answer was basically: ā€œThe status quo is that we are gonna re-implement Kleros, put ANJ instead of PNK and add subscription fees. No counter proposal. But you are free to do an AGP.ā€.
Note that this is not representative of the general interactions I had with people from Aragon who were generally supportive and eager to work together.

Maybe we should have posted the AGP sooner, but the goal was to propose an AGP together with the Aragon One team. You also have to keep in mind that we started to discuss 2 years ago with them, before Aragon became a community-run project, and that we did not want to address the community before getting a formal answer from them to avoid it looking like if we were ā€œdoing stuff behind their backā€.

I think you mean ā€œAragon court is not simply Kleros with ANJ replacing PNKā€.
If that is what you mean, that was the Aragon One plan (as announced in Aracon).

Now, they plan to do a re-implementation of Kleros with difference in implementation details. I havenā€™t seen the interface so I canā€™t tell about them, but on the contract and cryptoeconomic part, a regular user would probably not be able to tell the difference. Even at an algorithmic level, data structures which were created for Kleros are planed to be reused. I donā€™t think there is any contentious point over-there, as the Aragon One team has well communicated that it was ā€œheavily inspiredā€ by the work at Kleros. This is very honest from their part.

Yeah, at the technical level you are completely right. But cryptosystems are not just technical, they have a social layer, people, communities, virtue signalling, etc.
Itā€™s a unwritten decency rule that you donā€™t fork your users/partners but try to have a mutually beneficial relationship instead.
Forking Kleros would mean that Aragon is willing to fork projects if they become successful. That means that even if Aragon is not your competitor now (initial Aragon paper was not really competing with Kleros as the proposed court was completely different), it may become one in the future if what you do is interesting. So maybe you prefer to work with a project that is unlikely to become a competitor and more likely to use what you are building.

Yeah for sure, Kleros is made to be freely forkable. The goal being to be able to fork in case of 51% attacks or if difference in legal philosophy between factions of the community were shown to prevent them to work under the same system. Actually Kleros goes even further than that and the ā€œKleros public licenseā€ even allows to establish filiation through a derived name or logo.

We are not only talking about open source software, but also of cryptoeconomic networks. Forking the opensource software is in no way problematic.

Forking the cryptoeconomic network, without a 51% attack nor an irreconcilable difference in term of ruling philosophy is.

Kleros team itself made uniswap.ninja a front-end fork of uniswap.exchange pulling the list of tokens from the TokenĀ² Curated Registry. But the network was not forked, the liquidity is shared between those front-ends. The uniswap team actually suggested the idea and gave its benediction. The Kleros team audited uniswap smart contracts and put bug bounties on them: mutually beneficial relationship increasing network effects, not splitting networks.

Yes, there is no plan to remove this ANJ utility, but basically merge ANJ and PNK utility (you can call it PNK-ANJ token if that makes more sense).

I donā€™t really understand this point, do you think PNK marketcap is high? low?
Which marketcap do you envision for ANJ (minted ANJ)?

Why do you have the assumption that there would be a high supply of ā€œcheap PNKā€? Buyers buy where itā€™s the cheapest (and when they donā€™t arbitrageurs takes opportunity which ends up to quite similar results). So if you can get 1 PNK for 1$ or for 0.9$ worth of ANT, if you want PNK youā€™ll gonna buy ANT to swap them to PNK.

I think that is the misunderstanding. The proposal is not about making a uniswap-like curve where the Aragon Association puts ANT and Kleros Cooperative puts PNK (if it were to be the proposal you would be right, it would not give more utility to ANT and it would be a really unfair proposal).
But that is not the proposal, the proposal is about making a bonded curve which will mint some PNK for ANT holders (not the other way arround, there is no initial ANT for PNK holders). PNK is not to replace the planed ANJ, but they are to be merged together.
The exact same reasoning which leads to ANJ bonded curve to create utility for ANT holders applies to the merged PNK-ANJ:

  • If there is 1$M worth of ANT which are removed from circulation to create 1$M worth of ANJ, that would undilute ANT such that ANT market cap of circulating supply is still 20M$ but split within less holders. So if you had previous 1/20th of ANT worth (1/20)*20=1M$, you now have (1/19)*20=1.05M$ worth of ANT.
    Thatā€™s the same if there is 1M$ of PNK created through the curve.
    (note that to simplify computation, I assumed fixed price on the curve, but in practice that would be a more complex curve)

Unless those uses a Kleros with PNK which is not merged with ANJ. By working together, we prevent the risk of one ā€œcourt winning the competitionā€. Both Kleros and Aragon communitities reduces their variance. Both Kleros and Aragon increases their expected value due to increased collaboration and network effects.

In this proposal due to ANT holders getting PNK, they also get voting rights in the court governance.
In addition the proposal propose for a gradual increase of PNK in the curve for ANT holders and funding. This means asking ANT holders multiple times.

That is the point of this proposal. Since a significant part of PNK would be allocated to ANT holders through the curve, that is a merger proposal (between the PNK based DAO and the potential ANJ based DAO). Value is definitely not flowing away from ANT holders but to them as PNK would be allocated to ANT holders through the curve.

Thanks :slight_smile:

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If this is how it really went down thatā€™s not cool. Regardless of the decision being made, that isnā€™t very respectful. That being said I want there so ĀÆ_(惄)_/ĀÆ

Yes my mistake!

To be fair kleros is not an aragon partner, it just uses the platform (free of charge at that). To the best of my knowledge, it has never participated In any AGPs, not sure if kleros even owns any ANT (do they?) Kleros use of Aragon should not infer any kind of special treatment

But I totally understand why you would be pissed, competition would likely see one project be the defacto winner. And given Aragon is miles ahead In the DAO platform space, this would put Kleros at a disadvantage In this competition.

But i do feel the need to push back against this idea that other users would not ā€œfeel safeā€ on Aragon. Kleros is clearly implementing something that Aragon also planned to implement. For sure, kleros has been working on this for years and has done an excellent job, but I would expect the team to do what is strategically correct to strengthen the Aragon network. At the end of the day Aragon has a responsibility to ANT holders, not any perceived unwritten rules.

I still dont understand this are you saying there would be PNK and ANJ? Or just PNK (minted for staked ANT?)

I understand that in either case, there is locking ANT and thus positive pressure on price. My issue is AFAIK, it is not possible to buy ANJ at all. PNK on the other hand is available on the open market. Why buy ANT and lock it for PNK when you can just buy PNK with DAI, ETH, or BTC? rationality if you are a crypto user seeking arbitration services, you are more likely to have one of these assets. I still dont see how this makes sence from a ANT perspective.

Also as I understand it, ANJ is destroyed as it is converted back to ANT, what happens to the PNK minted with ANT?

But this is only ANT holders staked in the court right? What about ANT holders who are not staked? As it stands they still have governance rights over the Aragon Network. What about kleros

I dont understand this

The bottom line for me is this. As I understand the proposal, it dosnt give enough to ANT holders.

  1. PNK is available on the open market and thus ANT is not required for the Aragon court

  2. ANT holders would not have governance rights over Kleros, only token ANT holders staked

  3. If ANT holders no longer have confidence in a flock team, ANT holders can withdraw its budget and another flock team can take over the duties. Itā€™s not clear how ANT holders have the similar influence over the kleros dev team.

1 Seems intractable, but If 2 & 3 could be addressed Iā€™d vote yes

This person apologized yesterday. Letā€™s move on.

Kleros Cooperative does not own any ANT. People of Aragon have spent some time to convince Kleros to use Aragon. Kleros is not a ā€œpartnerā€, itā€™s a user. Users should be included in the governance.
Users of Kleros Cooperative collectively own 25% of the voting rights. Jurors, teams representing dapps connected to Kleros and end users of those dapps are users eligible for voting rights (even if only jurors need PNK).

Kleros is not competing in the DAO space. We needed a DAO and initially planed to build it. Due to Aragon working on that, we removed this part of the plan and used Aragon instead.

Kleros is competing in the crowdsourced smart contract enforced dispute resolution space on which it is miles ahead of competition.

Yeah, that can perfectly be argumented that the goal is to maximize ANT value and that forking/copying projects to replace their tokens with a ANT derivative is a strategy to do so. This has worked for some other projects before (the example I get in mind is TRON, although it is not completely comparable as contrary to TRON, Aragon One team is properly citing sources).

However the general communication and values of Aragon seems to be quite different.

Moreover, I do think that even if the goal was just to optimize ANT value, working with Kleros would be a good move (actually, Iā€™d even be willing to bet on a conditional prediction market that working with Kleros would increase ANT value).

The ticker is economically irrelevant, what is relevant is what role it has. With this proposal a unique coin would play the same role as PNK and ANJ.

It will also be possible to buy ANJ on the open market.

For the exact same reason as in the ANJ proposal, because the curve would provide you a better price than the open market.

Even if you donā€™t have ANT and donā€™t want to bother buying some, there will be arbitrageurs taking advantage of it and putting ANT into the curve to sell PNK in the open market.

I think you mean ā€œto provide arbitration servicesā€. ANJ and PNK are only needed for arbitrators, not end users.

The same.

The still have rights about related funding proposals. Arbitrated contract which are part of Aragon can give arbitrary rights to them (Kleros contracts just gives rulings, itā€™s then up to arbitrated contracts to decide what to do with them).

We donā€™t need to a unique collaboration proposal. We can do multiple ones, each with different quantities of PNK, funding and different applications which must be made.

Similarly in the ANJ proposal, once ANJ is on the open market, ANT would not be required for the Aragon court.
But in both case, ANT would be used when it provides a better price than the open market.

Could you expend more on which kind of governance rights are you expecting?
Because to my understanding ANT holders not converting ANT into ANJ into the bonded curve would not have right in the court either.

ā€œThis can take the form of multiple deals, each providing funding and additional PNK to the bonded curve.ā€
ANT holders can chose not to do new deals if something were to go wrong.
Kleros is freely forkable (the fact that the A1 team had planed to fork Kleros to put their own tokens is a good proof of that), so the project can easily be taken over.
Arbitrable smart contracts (this would include Aragon DAOs) can be written such that their arbitrator can be changed.

ā€œThis can be provided to Kleros cooperative or to the Kleros DAO (using Aragon fund management module).ā€
In the second case, the funds would be in the Kleros DAO, in which ANT holders who put ANT in the curve would get voting rights.

Users do not and should not have governance rights, anyone can participate in signaling or letting their views and opinions know. But when it comes to rights this is purely up to the tokenholders. If users want a say in governance and direction of the project they should buy and hold ANT.

I also think working with kleros is a good move, but the terms have to be right. As far as the prediction market goes, this is a fantastic idea! In fact I think kleros should launch one. It would give a valuable signal to the rest of the ANT holders. Level K is working in this very idea, Iā€™m really excited to see this for all AGPs in the future

If the way i understand how ANJ will work is correct (I say if because you are more informed than I am on the current Aragon court implementation) it is not irrelevant. As I understand it ANJ will not be tradable.

In any case in the current implementation, every ANJ token will have been minted by locking ANT. With your proposal 50% of the total supply of PNK has already been minted and available on the open market

I did not know this, but as mentioned above it even if it is available, buying ANJ is buying ANT that has already been locked. Buying PNK on the other hand has already been minted and no ANT is locked.

I think I understand what youā€™re saying now. Basically, because there is a bonding curve, the price of PNK is pegged to ANT and when the curve diverges from the market price arbitragers will bring the peg back?

Yes

So minting new PNK can only happen via the curve too?

My question was not clear. The Aragon court is developed by teams accountable to ANT holders. If they are not happy with the team, they can be fired by ANT holders

This is has nothing to do with staking. ANT holders who stake for ANJ and those who donā€™t have this right.

  • What accountability will kleros have to ANT holders?
  • will they have to submit the development road map to ANT holders?
  • How do ANT holders veto decisions made by the klerso DAO?

Kleros has already done a token sale and does not need to apply for funding like the rest of the flock teams, but if we are going to allow Kleros to take over a core part of our infrastructure we (ANT holders not just the subset who want to be jurors) need to have some control over kleros

As above.

Forking is a last resort. As networks grow stronger, there is less incentive to fork. If Aragon chooses to use Kleros we will significantly increase the network effect of kleros. IMO we need more influence than simply forking

Summing up, my main concern still remains governance. I also would really like to see a prediction market.

Also, do you have some more information about kleros usage? How much has kleros earned for jurors since launch and how much PNK is staked

I think everyone should be included in governance. Apparently you think that too.
In addition, I think users should have governance rights (at least this is what it is in some projects like Kleros and MelonPort).

Gnosis will support conditional prediction markets. And since it will be Oracle agnostic, you will be able to make those predictions markets, using a realit.io Oracle, backed by Kleros as an arbitrator.
Iā€™m not well aware about Level K work on this, but thatā€™s definitely something weā€™d also support.

According to the code on Github, ANJ is planned to be a tradable ERC20.

Well itā€™s less than 50% (36.4%).
But again, itā€™s about getting a smaller share of a bigger cake, but have more cake overall. As Proposal Agreements / DAO constitution are just one usecase of Kleros. This would draw them and let them have arbitration fees in the current and future dapps connected to Kleros. I think that Proposal Agreement disputes may bring something on the order of magnitude of 10% of Kleros juror fees in the short term (even less in the long term as more usecases would be implemented).

Yeah, and again, thatā€™s the smaller share of a bigger cake argument.

Assuming the curve is linear, yes.
We will probably have a non linear curve, so that would be more like a soft-peg. But you get the high level idea.
It aligns incentives:

  • If PNK fails, people will put PNK back to get ANT diluting ANT.
  • If ANT fails, people will put all their ANT to get PNK as it would be the only use, diluting PNK more than expected.
    This incentivize collaboration as each party need the other to succeed.

Well, it depends of the funding deal. If itā€™s really large, we could mint all remaining PNK in it.
In case of milestone deals, there would still be some PNK to mint left which could be minted in other occasions (that would still need to be decided by PNK holders which would comprise people who put ANT).

In case of milestone deals, they can refuse the funding for other milestones.

In milestone deals.

No. Note that current ANJ proposal does not plan a ANT veto either (which would be bad for cryptoeconomic incentives anyways). So nothing changes.

Kleros Coop just sold a small amount of tokens (for approx 5-6000 ETH). We do have immediate funding, but need more for next year (this way, with the other rounds or a mix of both). If ANT are to get significant PNK through the curve, that is obviously in a funding deal.

Aragon DAOs can change their arbitrator, increasing the impact of forking.

You can look on Kleroscan. There was more than 15k$ of arbitration fees paid to jurors and more than 350k$ worth of ETH which went through contracts protected by Kleros.

Yes, everyone should be included in governance. I consider this discussion governance. However, hard rights should be the realm of token holders. I would expect any project using Aragon and cares about its future direction to hold some ANT and participate in ANVs

sure but Augur is live now will that not do for this purpose now? the goal is just to give a signal.

I understand your point but for ANT holders not participating as jurors there is no cake, or at least only up to the ANT locked to mint PNK and as you say later in the post, its possible for Kleros to mint even more not locked by ANT.

I think you are conflating two things here. Iā€™m not saying ANT holders have a direct influence in the court. what Iā€™m saying is ANT holders can fire the team developing the court and presumably, any upgrades done to the contracts will need ANT holders support

I understand, but after the deal expires Aragon and ANT holders have no control over the kleros contract upgrades. Whereas with our implementation, ANT holders will always retain governance of our infrastructure.

leaving the numbers aside for a moment, (I have confidence that the Association will get the best deal if it comes to it) for me to be supportive there needs to be tighter integration between Kleros and Aragon. ANT holders need to have some kind of rights in Kleros and not just those staked as jurors

The court system is at the core of the network. ANT holders rights must be protected. Simply saying we can fork if we are not happy is not good enough.

EDIT:
im getting 500 internal server error with the link

I think all users should be given governance voice, no matter their wealth. But agree to disagree.

Augur does not really support conditional markets. Maybe we could ā€œhackā€ it by making 2 markets on ANT price. With one resolving as invalid if the proposal passes and one resolving as invalid if the proposal does not.

They still get more cake, for them itā€™s a larger share of a smaller cake, because due to ANT being locked, they get the ANT undiluted and have more right in other Aragon applications.

That depends of the funding deal, if you think we should have a funding deal encompassing all remaining PNK such that no other can be minted, why not?
But I think itā€™s better for Aragon to go the milestone way.

In case of milestone deal, yes.

For most Kleros usecases, ANT holders who locked ANT can vote for updates.
For Aragon Proposal Agreement, you could also have ANT holders deciding not to follow a court upgrade (and stay in a previous court). Thatā€™s a design decision for DAOs, not for the court.

Not on Kleros itself (unless they locked some ANT), but they can have some for DAOs (DAOs could chose not to follow court upgrades).
ANT holders can decide to keep full control for its DAO usecases (proposal agreement) and get partial control (only ANT locked can vote) for other usecases which, if they were no deal, ANT would have had 0 control of.

ANT holders can have all control of proposal agreement, for other usecase, they get partial control while they would have had none if they were no deal.

The court system is just a small service DAOs need. ANT holders can have full control over updates for this particular service. For other Kleros usecases, they get partial control while they would have had none otherwise.

Thatā€™s made by a Kleros community member and itā€™s working for me.

Would you mind elaborating on that? This sounds nice but how would you see this implemented? Without KYC any motivated person can build several identities for very little money. Iā€™m curious to read more discussions around your proposal but a fundamental aspect of Aragon is that token holders are the governing body. Therefore if you would like to see the two projects working much closer together, we canā€™t just agree to disagree, weā€™ll need to be aligned on that as well.

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Yeah, at Kleros Cooperative (note that it is different from Kleros itself, itā€™s more akin to Aragon Association), we do it the oldschool way with a French cooperative entity which gives voting rights to users.
Melon Port does it having users representative in a DAO.

For Aragon, you could easily have a DAO where individual projects get voting rights (projects tends to be easy to verify compared to individuals as they arenā€™t that many).

Yeah, there will be a Proof of Humanity project whose goal is to verify human identity in a decentralized way (having members vouching for others and creating disputes to prevent registration of false humans and double registrations). If we were to work together, we could make a Aragon DAO with 1 human = 1 vote using this system.

I think we all agree that users should be included in governance. And they are, as they can leave, fork or create competing systems.
I donā€™t think there was any statement from Aragon saying that people should not be included in governance if they donā€™t have money (from communication materials, itā€™s quite the opposite). Itā€™s more of how to include people in governance.
Itā€™s also an open question for Kleros how to keep users included on governance, as we rely and less on Kleros Cooperative.

I would love to have a less plutocratic system, however, that is just not possible right now. how do you quantify the rights? how do you protect against sibyl attack? what about the rights of those who contributed capital, how do you balance their rights? all this is possible because they contributed finance. In the future, I hope we can implement quadratic voting and some other measures to bring the power disparity down but still itā€™s only right that those who contribute capital are the ones who have the final say.

same as above I personally have a 3 DAOs on the main net does this mean I get 3x the voting power of kleros?

It sounds very egalitarian, but is that really fair? 1 person 1 vote suggests each person contributes to the project equally and has the same expertise. this is not the case

what ever works!

I dont want to get stuck on this point because for me it is not the major issue anyway but this simply not true.

  1. if participating in the Aragon Court requires ONLY locked ANT, it stands to reason that there will be more locked ANT. if we go with this proposal, yes there will also be locked ANT but there is a substantial ammount of PNK which has no ANT locked. For ANT holders who are not locked, the only cake they get is the fact that there is less supply of ANT
  2. Locked ANT still has governance rights, they will not undiluted those who remain unlocked

and this is the crux of the issue. many ANT holders may not wish to be jurors, they should not have to lock their ANT to retain influence over their core infastructure

As i said before

so to be clear, your saying the court that Aragon DAOs use will not be able to be upgraded without ANT holders voting for it?

The Proof of Humanity project should allow quadratic voting.

They may have a final say on how to allocate capital, but not a final absolute control on the system which is created. Them not having full control of created systems can even benefit them as it involves other stakeholders of the projects.
This is already quite often the case in the legacy world:

  • Companies give voting rights to worker representatives.
  • Public services gives voting rights to users (for example, when I was in high school in France, as a student representative, I had 1 voting right in the administrative council).

That was the point of attract-extract mention in section ā€œCreating competition with users is dangerousā€. In classical systems, users cannot fork out. So once platforms are too big, they tend to locked there and get value extracted from them.
But with crypto systems, users can fork out. This changes power dynamics.
If you create a Facebook app and Facebook copy it and remove yours, you are out of business.
But if Aragon makes a copy of Kleros and put their token instead, Kleros can move to another DAO platform or make an Aragon fork which would use the original Kleros for proposal curation.
That is in itself a governance power, even if not formalized through on-chain voting.
That is what it described in the Aragon manifesto:

We are committed to building organizational forms that defend self-sovereignty ā€” where a user can always exercise choice, either by participating or exiting.

In todayā€™s world, our governing power over societyā€™s common goods is negligible.

Even for exercising small changes over your environment (your city, state or corporation), you might have to go through cumbersome and opaque bureaucratic processes.

This happens because the coordination costs were high in the old world. But now, thanks to the Internet and decentralized governance, we can, and must, engineer systems to empower the peopleā€™s voice to their fullest potential.

Also, if you dislike those broken governance processes, you cannot easily exit from them . Some organizations own your identity (governments), some others own your data (Facebook), and some others even own the path for you to exit (borders), restricting your choice of leaving.

We must build organizational structures that allow users to exit with minimal friction if they fundamentally disagree with the governance of those structures.

To continue with the Aragon manifesto:

We are committed to the creation of long-term value versus short-term profit ā€” which in turn, advances sustainability.

We want these values to last. We are in this for the long run. In order to make lasting impact and disrupt existing power structures, we must create systems that provide sustainable economic value to their participants.

We must honor and encourage the communities that sustain Aragon itself, and we must do so by rewarding those who defend the values outlined in this manifesto.

Copying users to put an ANT derivative token instead of the original token would clearly a violation of the manifesto.

We are in this for the long run.

That would be short-termed. For sure it could provide a small boost to ANT value due to getting a useful system at a discounted cost (and even then, thatā€™d be quite inefficient to re-implement everything). But in the long term thatā€™s a bad signal for users.

we must create systems that provide sustainable economic value to their participants

Copying projects ā€œjustā€ to put your own token is definitely not a way to provide sustainable economic value to participants.

We must honor and encourage the communities that sustain Aragon itself, and we must do so by rewarding those who defend the values outlined in this manifesto.

Copying system to replace their token with a ANT derivative is clearly not way to reward communities.

If Aragon were to give voting power to users, that would obviously not be through a system vulnerable to sybil attacks. If you were to allow large users to vote, youā€™d do something like MelonPort with its Melon Exposed Business representatives. Iā€™m not arguing for Aragon to give voting power to its users right now. Iā€™m just saying that the argument ā€œYou donā€™t have that much ANT, so your opinion is not importantā€ should not be made.

Iā€™m not advocating that to completely control Aragon, but a 1 person - 1 vote DAO could be cool.
If you use systems like liquid voting, even with 1 person - 1 vote, you get more important contributors having more control due to delegations given to them.

But note that we are now going to discussions which are really weakly related to the proposal. So thatā€™d be good to recenter.

Proposal agreements are only one of Kleros usecases (perhaps 10% of the jurors fees in the short term). So locking ANT to get PNK to vote for proposal agreement / DAO constitution disputes would only be one reason among many more to lock ANT for PNK.

Whether itā€™s with Kleros or a Kleros ANJ re-implementation, ANT put into the curve do not give governance rights.

They donā€™t lose it with the milestone proposal.

Technically that would not be the court, but the proposal agreement contract which could, if ANT holders decided to, point to a previous version (this would lead to a court fork).
I donā€™t think it would be a good idea as it would give an additional point of failure to the system (system could fail upon both ANT and PNK majority being dishonest). But thatā€™s not something Iā€™d be opposed to as Kleros only gives ruling to contracts, contracts decide what to do with them and decide of their arbitrators, they can also decide to change arbitrators.

I also would like to remind that the proposal of the thread is just one proposal. There may be others. I asked someone from Aragon One if they would have other proposals, but they never gave any.

I would also like to remind that if there is an agreement, it should also be voted by PNK holders. Kleros is not just me and I can only give my own opinion.

Aragon Governance is off-topic for this thread but you do raise some good points. I encourage you to create a new thread where this can be discussed further as this is one of the best ways community members and anyone interested in governance can exert influence and shape the project.

I totally disagree with your opinion. Aragon is not in violation of the manifesto.

The fact that Aragon has been working on these contracts for months means that it is not simply kleros with ANT swapped in.

Aragon courts will functionally be different to kleros.

  • In the Aragon implementation, the final appeals process will be a futarchy decision.
  • The Aragon implementation will also have a subscription model
    I have not been following the development closely but, using development time as a heuristic, I believe your characterisation is not correct.

Kleros can fork Aragon with minimal friction if it wishes to, it will not take a number of developers months to do like the Aragon court has.

The Aragon governance process is very transparent. Up until this post, Kleros has not participated in this governance process nor have they voted in any ANVs.

Summing up my position:

Thank you very much for responding to all my concerns and helping me to understand the proposal.

I do think it would be mutually beneficial for both projects to use the same protocol. I do get the point that if kleros was to dominate the arbitration space, the merger would be beneficial to ANT holders. This is not a guarantee but it is a real possibility and far more likely with Aragons support

If the proposal was to pass, I trust the AA would negotiate the best deal before putting it to another vote

That being said, I am not convinced with the governance and for this reason, I will not be voting for this

  1. If Aragon implements the ā€œproposal agreement contractā€ ANT holders have a say in upgrades to the to this contract in perpetuity, regardless if the nest team receives funding or not. We are not forced to fork.

  2. AFAIK staked and non staked ANT retains governance rights (maybe someone working on the implementation can clarify). This proposal only gives token holders bonded in the curve governance rights in kleros and thus the proposal agreement contract

I may change my mind if

  1. Non staked ANT holders are given sufficient governance rights of upgradeability without having to fork the network. This could be an Aragon DAO with a significant amount of PNK in its agent app controlled by ANT holders or some other mechanism

  2. This proposal receives support from other flock teams. I would take their views and opinions into account when the time comes to vote

  3. There is a strong signal from a prediction market

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This was the original plan. I think some people of A1 realized that it would not be good to do so from a communication perspective.

The ANJ proposal does not involve futarchy. It is just an interesting research direction.

This can perfectly be done by the proposal agreement contract with current Kleros.

You can have the ā€œproposal agreement contractā€, controlled by ANT holders, who decides which version to use. I donā€™t advise it, but I donā€™t oppose it either.

The proposal agreement contract can have ANT holders as a final say. I donā€™t think it is what is planed currently with ANJ. I donā€™t advise it either.

Someone of A1 would need to clarify, but I do not think it is what is planed with the ANJ proposal.

What do you expect to be a strong signal?
Since it concerns only a small part of Aragon, I think the price of the YES option would only be at ~+5% of the NO option.

Not sure about the threshold but 5% seems pretty low considering the decision should (in theory) aggregate all information and implications of a YES or NO vote.

To answer your question directly I would take the advice of experts (the guys at level K, our research lead luke etc) as to what constitutes a strong signal.

I mean a predicted price 5% higher. You cannot expect Aragon working with Kleros to increase the price that much as itā€™s a small decision.

Wanted to chime in here briefly, though I intend to write a longer response in the next few days.

First, I think this is an interesting proposal and happy to see it proposed.

I have a lot of respect for Clement and the Kleros team. They are doing great work, and their work has obviously heavily inspired the direction we have been pursuing with the Aragon Court.

WRT the Pros/Cons of Aragon Competing with Users

I think this is a fairly non-sensical argument. The intention from day one was for the Aragon Network to not only create a court/dispute resolution service for Aragon organizations, but also to more broadly create a range of services tailored to these organizations.

The development of infrastructure and open source software for DAOs is largely a public good, and the only way to make the provision of this public good sustainable for the network over the long term is to leverage that work to provide some sort of advantage in provisioning other related services that are not public goods. I think it is reasonable and has been indicated as the direction Aragon has been going since the very beginning that it would be community governed and that it would provide both public infrastructure and private opt-in services for DAOs to consume.

That does not mean that we are competing with our users, though if some of our users decide they also want to provide services to DAOs, thatā€™s fine, but they should not be under the illusion that the Aragon Network will not directly compete with them to provide the same services simply because they have decided to leverage the public infrastructure that Aragon has invested in and provided to everyone for free.

WRT to the proposal to link ANT to PNK via a bonding curve

I generally like this approach to aligning incentives between a service protocol that relies on a token and the Aragon Network. This is very similar to the approach that we have planned to take for the Aragon Court and likely will also take for similar services like an Aragon Proof of Stake chain.

It is a bit unclear to me exactly how Clement is proposing the bonding curve be configured, especially with regard to the segmentation of the PNK supply. Typically a bonding curve is able to mint the bonded tokens, so the bonding curve contract would need to be able to mint PNK as ANT is deposited based on some market making rule.

I think the specifics would need to be worked out but I donā€™t see any reason to think that they couldnā€™t be worked out such that the Kleros court would offer a similar financial benefit to ANT holders that the Aragon court would, and so I think that operating under that assumption for now makes sense and we can focus instead on the other aspects of the proposal from a strategic and collaboration perspective might be more challenging.

WRT to strategic divergences between Kleros Court and Aragon Court

Dispute resolution, and in-particular the proposal agreement use-case, is absolutely critical to the emergence and success of ā€œtrueā€ DAOs (DAOs which allow fluid and permissionless participation) IMO. I also think that this is the killer use-case for a decentralized court.

Things like escrow, price feeds, and other areas the Kleros team has focused on are definitely useful, but significantly less relevant to Aragon or its userā€™s immediate need. These use cases may also be better served by more traditional arbitration methodsā€“its not totally clear to me that they need a decentralized courtā€“but ā€œtrueā€ DAOs definitely do need a decentralized court.

Our decision process in designing the Aragon Court has been specifically focused on the goal of making proposal agreements as robust as possible and then ensuring that these agreements are embedded and tightly integrated into the Aragon client and apps like voting to make it easy to leverage these tools to empower Aragon organizations to be more DAO-like.

It doesnā€™t make much sense to me to focus (or fund) development of a court that doesnā€™t have absolute focus/priority on first and foremost enabling this use-case for Aragon organizations.

In the future it may make sense for the Aragon Court (or if this proposal were to pass, an Aragon-centric Kleros Court) to expand into other use-cases, but it shouldnā€™t be the priority. Aragonā€™s goal is to make DAOs useful and ubiquitous, and until we achieve that goal I donā€™t think it makes sense to fund largely orthogonal efforts.

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