Discussion Regarding AGP - Aragon Acquisition of DOTs

I thought it was established and explained that we do have indeed an MFN agreement on this.

Additionally, there is no ā€œtake it or leave itā€ situation.

Is the below not of help? If not, please do let me know which parts would need further clarification and Iā€™d be happy to provide them.

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I think if Aragon was willing to commit to developing and building a parachain on polkadot perhaps that could be used as leverage in a negotiation, but I donā€™t think that at this point it makes sense for the project to make any such commitment and I donā€™t think the AA is in the position to make such a commitment for the project within the scope of their negotiations.

As far as I understand things, the ā€œArachainā€ being built on polkadot is just a potential path towards scalability. One which warrants further research and exploration, but would be extremely risky to make a firm commitment on at this time. Polkadot hasnā€™t launched yet, and many technical details appear to still be being figured out, and so we canā€™t even do a full analysis of the technical and economic. I would be strongly against making a commitment like that even if it meant a substantial allocation of free DOTs for the project.

However, allocating a small portion of the projects treasury to DOTs at this point, without any commitments to build a parachain, and assuming the AA is able to negotiate a fair price, seems like a reasonably thing to consider. Polkadot is interesting tech and is exploring a different approach to addressing scalability than Eth2.0.

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Arachain currently being built (i did not realize this) would be enormous leverage, if used correctly. Resources expended (time, labor, attention) is a powerful commitment, probably more powerful than a document of vague promises.

Unfortunately if the leverage is squandered by simultaneously negotiating co-buying discounts (as disclosed by Stefano) for the personal accounts of the negotiators, then of course Aragon, the project supposedly being represented in the negotiations, has no leverage at all. The other side of the table, understanding that the AA negotiators want to get their beaks wet at the currently offered discount, has absolutely no reason to present a better deal, because if the Polkadot negotiator walks away, the AA negotiators lose the personal account co-buying opportunity they want.

The formality of declaring/labeling the co-buying deal ā€˜independentā€™ from the aragon buying deal has no real impact of the game theory of the negotiation, especially considering that rzurrer, the seller, publicly bragged on twitter that he owns a ā€œton of ANTā€ and turnout is low on ANT ballots. The winner of the ballot may have been viewed as a foregone conclusion in polkadotā€™s mind.

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The point I was making is that at this point the Arachain is not currently being built, it is very much in a casual research phase and simply an exploration of what might make sense in the future. It has not been funded by any previous AGP process and does not exist on the projects roadmap. Therefore, the notion that there is a strong commitment on behalf of Aragon to leverage Polkadot that could be used in negotiation is false.

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interesting. i see what you meant. research/planning/exploration is an important and time-consuming part of building, and would be viewed as an ante in other negotiating contexts. In a broader view, the announcement at Aracon was a social commitment, that would give credence to the idea that Aragon is seriously considering building on Polkadot. My main point is that Aragon does have lots of leverage with polkadot.

I do agree that the with strings/without strings prices are different. (and have said so on the twitter-dot-com in the past).

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Just adding this here. The OTC market is in fact booming in the last few days, despite the stated risks.

As both a sale holder of ANT and DOTs I think both projects are tarnishing their reputations from the manner of this acquisition.

While I agree Aragon needs to hedge platform risk. Polkadots continuing errant behaviour and untested platform ( fisherman unproven , possible plutocratic governance ) in my view does not warrant a paid acquisition by Aragon. It further makes the case for free acquisition as @seeking has elucidated.

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Is there anywhere I can find a list of conflict of interests regarding the parties involved in this? For a deal/topic of this size I would expect to see any potential conflicts outlined clearly so that voters can make an informed decision.

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@seeking Thank you for sharing your thoughts on this. (also thank you to @A.Zhang and many others on this thread). Iā€™ve been trying to stay out of the discussion because Iā€™ve already spent way too much time analyzing and critiquing the governance/token model of Polkadot as well as the recent actions by the W3F team.

This is beginning to get a bit ridiculous though. The entire discussion around DOTs, how itā€™s being brought up, and the process of selectively disclosing information feels wrong. I donā€™t like it, not one bitā€¦ At this point Iā€™m too burnt out to articulate myself clearly, but you did a great job highlighting many important points so thank you for that :slight_smile:

I would certainly love for the price to be public, and believe me, we tried. Unfortunately, in the world of fundraising and legal agreements, things are not that easy.

Why get involved in a process that doesnā€™t align with the values and goals of Aragon (transparency, etcā€¦)? I get that itā€™s important to choose the best tech to support the platform and that scaling is important, but is it worth sacrificing (or compromising on) core values?

Our goal was to negotiate a great deal on behalf of ANT holders and present it under a vote. What ANT holders do from now on is entirely on them. They either trust the AA and its negotiation skills, or they donā€™t, which Iā€™m not judging at all. Iā€™m sure ANT holders will do whatā€™s right for them.

Voter turnout is very low. This is a high stakes vote. It would be easy, trivial even, for any well funded individual or organization to sway this vote significantly. How is that being addressed?

I think the most relevant information on this is here: Clarifications on AGP-41: Acquisition of DOTs

The proposer @rzurrer is involved with the web3 foundation / polkadot as discussed above.

In regards to conflict of interest, I think itā€™s important to take that with a grain of salt, everyone in this thread may have different interests, and many (or most) of the people posting in this thread had not ever posted or engaged in the community prior to this issue. You do not need to hold ANT to post here or to be heard, you donā€™t need to hold ANT to submit a proposal. Someone who holds a lot of ANT but even more of another asset may still be less economically aligned with the project than someone who has a small stack of ANT but is passionate about the project and spends hours working on it. While its tempting to try and get everyone to truthfully disclose all of their interests and try and gleam their motivations for saying or doing some specific thing, its probably best to look closely at the proposal itself and whether it is good or bad and make an independent determination.

Iā€™m not sure why allowing a proposal to be voted on would not align with Aragonā€™s values. Itā€™s totally reasonable for ANT holders to reject the proposal because the terms of the agreement are under some non-disclosure agreement. Giving ANT holders a voice in important decisions is I think strongly aligned with the core values of Aragon, if we expect the Association to filter out any and all potentially controversial votes from the AGP process then how can we expect to learn anything meaningful about where ANT holders as a group stand on issues?

This is an interesting challenge, as if all votes are low stakes, there is actually very little incentive to get involved and participate in the process.

Right now there is not a tremendous amount of liquidity for ANT, so Iā€™m not sure how easy it would be for a well funded organization which hasnā€™t accumulated a large stake of ANT over an extended period of time (and intends to hold that position for an extended period of time) to really swing the outcome of this vote on a whim. If a well funded organization does decide to take a long term position in ANT, shouldnā€™t they be considered legitimate stakeholders in the project? If not, why not?

I think the main argument is one of expectations and norms, and the idea that the introduction of new stakeholders will result in the project diverging from those established expectations and norms within the community. As I mention in another thread, the role of the association in the current AGP process is to ensure that proposals meet some subjective criteria. Itā€™s not a straightforward job, and proposals like AGP-41 can be difficult to judge. If the association is heavy handed in filtering proposals, then the impact that ANT holders have on project governance is minimal, and if the filtering process is too loose, then the process can devolve into a tyranny of the majority. Personally, I think allowing AGP-41 to be voted on was the correct call, even though it is controversial and I do not know what the outcome will be.

Iā€™ve so far avoided taking a specific position on this issue but will go ahead and do so now. I think that ANT voters should vote no on AGP-41, not because I donā€™t think it is reasonable or prudent to consider acquiring DOTs, but rather because the proposal was submitted and finalized very close to the submission deadline. Had the proposal been submitted earlier perhaps discussion could have resulted in a proposal which was more agreeable, that included a maximum acceptable price. I would like to see proposals made earlier in the process and refined based on community feedback, and since there is no urgent need to acquire DOTs in this voting cycle specifically, I think it would be healthy for ANT holders to reject this particular proposal and then it could be discussed and resubmitted in the future in a hopefully less polarizing manner.

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Those are all really good points. Thanks again for taking the time to write such a thoughtful and detailed response :slight_smile:

When I said that I felt the proposal doesnā€™t align with the values of Aragon, it was really because of the lack of transparency and that it felt like it was being ā€œpushedā€ through by a special interest rather than being broadly supported by the community. As you mentioned, it doesnā€™t have to be that way and there is the role of the association to help guide that process as well (sorry I keep forgetting about the association lol).

You also raise a very good point that if all topics are trivial thereā€™s no incentive for voters to vote, but if the topics are too impactful then itā€™s a salient attack vector. Also, if thereā€™s not enough liquidity atm to swing/buy the vote thatā€™s a very helpful thing to know. I donā€™t watch the markets with that level of detail, so thank you for sharing that. It would be interesting in the future to have a dashboard for ANT metrics available to the community (assuming there already isnā€™t one):

  • price (tracked over time like any price chart)
  • total supply
  • total distribution
  • distribution of hodlers vs recent acquisitions
  • liquidity (tracked over time just like price)
  • voter turnout (tracked over time just like price)
  • ā€œflippeningā€ metric showing if there is enough liquidity to overrule the average voter turnout
  • and anything else relating to token metrics that could affect on-chain voting

This could potentially help provide clarity around token voting, esp when controversial and impactful proposals come up. Then people donā€™t have to speculate with tin foil hats that someone is ā€œbuyingā€ the vote, but can actually check. Of course any metrics we measure are going to be an imperfect map of the territory, but itā€™s data that could potentially contribute to better decision making, or at least better conversations. Currently thereā€™s lots of data in lots of different places, but (afaik) not in one easy to look at dashboard thatā€™s specifically tailored to the Aragon community and monitoring stats that could affect on-chain voting. Does anyone know if anything like this exist atm or if there are plans to build something like this?


Edit:
Thanks to @LouisGrx Iā€™ve discovered some helpful resources in this direction. Theyā€™re not in a script that you can easily run yourself to verify their accuracy, but itā€™s a start!
Foreground Capital Twitter conversation w @ameensol on the feasibility of acquiring enough ANT tokens to buy the upcoming AGP vote

Edit (again):
Thereā€™s also Scout which is building blockchain analytics and has a page specifically dedicated to Aragon. Etherscan and CoinMarketCap also provide a lot of metrics. Itā€™s also been discussed that having an Ethereum archive node availabe to the Aragon community could help with these kinds of endeavors.

Are there other resources out there that I am missing?

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FWIW, I am an ANT holder. Participated in ICO. Made an account for the first time in this forum for this discussion. I co-organized and led a night of our local meetup featuring aragon. I am also cofounder of the Concourse Open Community, and our long term plan is to decentralize into a DAO in 5-ish years, maybe shorter, maybe longer depending on lots of unknowns. I would like there to be good tooling at that point in time, and Aragon is the best bet.

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Yes, this is planned and the Aragon One team will be working on it soon :slight_smile:

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Have there been any updates on this, or are non-accredited retail investors in the Aragon community still being asked to vote on a deal they donā€™t have terms for to purchase tokens for a platform that isnā€™t even finalized or live and working in the wild yet?

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I have 0 ANT.

In terms of crypto, SpankChain only has fiat, BTC, ETH, and a few DOTs. I personally only hold SPANK, ETH, BTC, and ADT.

To be honest I donā€™t understand the ANT value prop. If itā€™s governance of the Aragon Network itself with the critical decision making power being how the treasury is spent, then itā€™s sort of a hedge-fund-by-token-vote, and I donā€™t find that a particularly interesting model. I have read plans about building the Aragon Court, where ANT becomes a work token (you stake it to participate as an arbiter), but I suppose I am waiting to see it demonstrated that DAOs would willingly abdicate their own sovereignty to the Aragon Court (especially if Aragon further abdicated sovereignty to the Polkadot governance system).

I am a supporter of Aragon project for its potential, but so far Iā€™ve been somewhat disappointed by the product. For one, I had wanted to use Aragon for the MolochDAO, but ultimately decided against it because Aragon DAOs werenā€™t designed to be 51% attack resilient, which means they canā€™t socially scale cooperation amongst mutually untrusting members.


Luis and Jorge seem to think I am mistaken and that the ragequit is achievable within their current framework, but I asked two weeks ago and havenā€™t seen anything yet.

I remain optimistic that the relentless Aragon team will figure out these challenges, and that I may find ANT more compelling in the future. Of course if this onchain governance treasury management works, I could see value being driven to the token purely from that. If this proposal passes and AGP-42 fails, for example, ANT holders might be inclined to submit a proposal for ANT buybacks from the Aragon treasury, given that the market cap of ANT ($25M) is lower than their reserves ($28M just in ETH, plus their other holdings).

A strong argument could be made that the Aragon team has too much money and is getting distracted. Instead of focusing on platform utility they are focused on technical scalability. I have told Luis and Jorge in the past that if MolochDAO isnā€™t being built on Aragon, then there is no point for Aragon to exist. I stand by that statement, and yet I still look forward to a more useful Aragon in the future!

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Have you read the whitepaper at all?

I read on Twitter that Aragon Black was interested in doing this, which I think is great, because A1 doesnā€™t have much bandwidth.

Not getting distracted at all, and the products we ship prove that.

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Alrighty @luis, I guess Iā€™ll just have to use the MolochDAO code instead of Aragon for #YangDAO2020 then. Would have been great to collaborate.

Iā€™m still learning about Aragon, but it recently came to my attention via @lkngtn that thereā€™s an awesome survey app. From the announcement:

Bringing our Survey app to Mainnet now enables any ANT holder to participate in the surveys we put up in order to get a feel of what the token holders actually want from the project.

Why was an AGP rather than the survey app to gather signals on how the community feels about Aragon going into negotiations to acquire DOTs?

The survey app hasnā€™t been updated to the latest code changes until very recently. I love the survey app and would love to use it for signaling, instead of the voting app.

I think we could do a Meta AGP to install the survey app in the governance DAO, and do next votes using it!

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