Proposal Information
Proposal summary:
Deploy Aragon Court to Arbitrum to facilitate more adoption and cross-chain usage without unbearable associated gas costs.
Previous work on the proposal area:
Early discussions and suggestions are here. After meeting with the technical committee, we think Arbitrum is a better choice for canonic deployment as it will also house some future Aragon development that will use Court.
Proposal description:
As most community members know, Aragon has strived to deploy its products to more cost-efficient blockchain networks to facilitate more adoption. Since Aragon is building products on Arbitrum which will use Aragon Court, it seems to be a natural chain of choice for L2 deployment.
Deployment of Aragon Court (Aragon Protocol) on Arbitrum is essential because it would allow Guardians to rule on cases without experiencing unbearable gas fees. However - while a lot of dApps are cross-chain nowadays - these deployments are independent of each other. So technically, they’re autonomous deployments under a single frontend. Our take is that for Aragon Court, a simple cross-chain deployment is not enough because most DAOs are still on the Ethereum network. The ideal solution would be a MetaDapp, where you can dispute an Ethereum case on Arbitrum. It will significantly reduce the associated gas costs for Guardians, allowing them to resolve Ethereum cases filed to the Arbitrum deployment of Aragon Court. The final goal is to make any case on any Solidity compatible chain disputable in Aragon Court deployment on Arbitrum.
How can it be achieved? Stage one is a standard deployment to the new network - Arbitrum. Then we need to onboard Guardians to that new deployment. We think that the best way to do it is staking rewards in ANT paid on Arbitrum for Guardians with staked ANT tokens on Ethereum. In such a way, we’ll be able to onboard experienced Guardians who were already using Aragon Court.
The next stage would be implementing a holistic resolution registry synced between all networks where Aragon Court resolutions are needed. However, we’ll need to use deterministic dispute UID, which will be unique for all networks. The simplest UID would be the hash of chain id and current dispute id in integer form: keccak256(abi.encodePacked(chainId, SEPARATOR, disputeId)). An even better solution would be to include a secondary UID, so it’s possible to identify the case in a network-agnostic way. For the Greet Escrow solution, UID can look like keccak256(abi.encodePacked(cid, milestoneIndex)). This UID should be included in dispute on-chain events of Aragon Court and can be passed either as dispute-related metadata or as a separate function argument for dispute initiation.
Finally, to publish results for his case, any user can post a resolution to the optimistic Resolution Registry by deterministic id with some collateral (150 DAI) and proof on Arbitrum. Thus, an Oracle network will be able to challenge it in scope of 7 days before it’s finalized in the registry. After successful finalization the user can withdraw his collateral. Greet can develop the open-source code for such Oracles, which we release as a Docker container.
Based on this we’d like to discuss with the Aragon community the following proposal;
Milestone 1
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Deploy Aragon Protocol (Court) smart contracts to Arbitrum;
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Deploy ANT token to Arbitrum;
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Implement a staking program for guardians who keep ANT locked on Ethereum with rewards on Arbitrum.
The implementation of the staking program depends on the outcome of an independent vote for this staking program by the Aragon community. If it is not a successful vote, we only do step 1 and 2.
Milestone 2
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Develop and deploy Aragon Protocol resolution registry smart contract to Ethereum, Polygon and BSC;
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Implement the resolution registry in Greet Escrow as a new dispute resolver smart contract;
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Develop docker image for Oracle network validators to challenge optimistic confirmation of Aragon Court resolutions for the generic and Greet use cases.
Proposal Rationale:
With the current gas fees on the Ethereum blockchain, the cost of running a dispute would start from 2000 DAI in total expenses, which makes it hard to justify for small to medium cases. Furthermore, the guardian chunk of those fees barely covers the gas costs associated with their voting process. Therefore, if we wish Court, Govern, and future products to succeed, we must allocate the main chunk of fees to guardians, not the blockchain infrastructure.
Increase of active Aragon DAOs
Implementation of this proposal not only improves the related DAO tooling and utility of ANT token, as it will be easier, cheaper, and safer to work as Aragon Guardian. It also paves the road (with the adoption of deterministic ids in Govern which is not part of this proposal) to the launching of Govern-based Aragon DAOs in any Solidity-based chain without the need to deploy and onboard Aragon Court on those chains. The deployment of Aragon Protocol on Arbitrum will also be used in the upcoming new version of the Aragon DAO engine on this network, so it’s either a hard or soft requirement to make it possible to launch new DAOs on this engine. To summarize, we believe that this proposal both increases the utility of ANT tokens and paves the road to more cross-chain adoption, which should increase the number of Aragon DAOs.
Limitations of any benefits mentioned above:
Milestone 1 may require an independent security audit if so voted by the tech committee. Smart contracts for milestone 2 will require an independent security audit for sure, at least I would vote for that. At the delivery stage, challenging of collateralized resolutions will be permissioned. AN DAO can add and remove such oracles on Ethereum. BSC and Polygon registries will be managed by multisigs, owners will be nominated by AN DAO.
Expected duration or delivery date (if applicable):
Up to 3 weeks after it’s voted and funded for milestone 1, up to 6 weeks for milestone 2 on the same terms. It may be delayed based on arrangement, results, and execution of the independent audit.
Team Information
Names and/or usernames, preferred contact method, and/or relevant social links for team members (Twitter, Github, Aragon Forum, etc.):
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Wenzel: https://twitter.com/wenzelvk
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Greet: Greet
Skills and previous experience in related or similar work:
The Greet Team already developed an advanced Contracts & Escrow solution integrating Aragon Court deployed to Ethereum in October. The first deal on Greet was the Aragon Association grant payment.
Funding Information
Milestone 1
Amount of ANT requested: 2000 / 3500 / 5000 ANT as voted by the AN DAO
Milestone 2
Amount of ANT requested: 4500 / 6000 / 7500 ANT as voted by the AN DAO
This funding doesn’t cover an independent audit, it should be arranged by the AN DAO tech committee and financed by AN DAO or Aragon Association.
Escrow where funds shall be transferred:
More detailed description of how funds will be handled and used:
The Greet DAO treasury will keep ANT, and fund development from its operational budget. Our expenses will be work compensation and gas fees for deployment and tests.