Frame & Aragon Flock

Hey everyone! First, if you haven’t yet, check out Frame v0.2! Frame has expanded its platform beyond first-class hardware support and now also supports hot accounts using a mnemonic phrase, keystore.json or private keys. But that’s not all, there’s one more account type in v0.2 to discover: Aragon smart accounts!

If you haven’t heard about Aragon smart accounts yet, they use your Aragon DAOs “agent” functionality to allow you to act on behalf of your DAO anywhere your individual Frame accounts can. This means using your DAO with Uniswap, Compound, OpenSea or any other dapp/protocol!

In addition to expanding our accounts platform, Frame v0.2 has added the ability for users to create their own connections to Ethereum and IPFS with the flip of a switch by running light clients and gateways within Frame. This means truly unstoppable access for any dapp using this infrastructure, including Aragon! We will be building more exciting integrations with these local connections over the next few months.

Aragon and Frame have a great history together and we’d love to continue working within the Aragon ecosystem. Frame has always aimed to become a member of Flock and meaningfully contribute to bringing Aragon’s vision to life. That being said, we’re not like other projects that get included in Flock. We work on a different layer of the stack and contribute to Aragon with integrations and functionality at the signer level, not within AragonOS.

We think there’s just as much of an opportunity to support Aragon at this level. We love the layer that we work on and believe it’s important for us to ramp up efforts here. We’re still a very small team with only one full-time member. We think Frame could have a very valuable impact on Aragon’s success given the resources to hire a full time team.

Our initiatives for the next 6 months include:

  • Continue iterating and improving the Aragon smart account integration to make it more powerful and easier to use. This includes keeping up with new features like safeExecute and improving the user experience.
  • Continue building on the local client connections to Ethereum and IPFS now available within Frame to make them more useful. This effort will replace the need for Aragon desktop with the ability to use Frame’s local connection to both resolve the Aragon client and pilot it in a truly decentralized and unstoppable way. This work will make it possible to do this for other dapps as well.
  • As part of this deeper Aragon integration we also want to focus on on-boarding. We want Frame will be the simplest way for someone to go from non-crypto user to participating in an Aragon DAO. After adding the ability to resolve the Aragon client we will also make it possible to launch that client from Frame to easily create or join a DAO and use your DAO as a smart account.
  • Decentralized notifications for DAOs and other dapps
  • Frame on mobile with ability to sync accounts/settings across platforms
  • Improved transaction/activity monitoring that will remove the need to link out to Etherscan for day-to day-use
  • Radspec integration will give users a better understanding of every transaction, we also plan to help create a more robust infrastructure for Radspec metadata
  • ENS support throughout Frame
  • ERC-20 and ERC-721 token support throughout Frame
  • Full gas controls
  • xDai and custom network support
  • Continue improving hardware signer support including support for BLE signers like Ledger Nano X

We’d love to hear feedback from the community about Frame joining the Aragon Flock. If there is support from the community we will submit this outline as a formal proposal.

Thanks!
Jordan

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This all sounds awesome. Thanks for putting all this together! The wallet, and signature process, is the core feature that gives users agency. It’s their connection from meatspace to the DAO. As such, optimizing this experience seems like a great way to give users more information and control.

Very curious how this would work

Very difficult to provide feedback without a concrete proposal. Please do share! :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the feedback @burrrata!

Currently we have a PoC that uses IPFS pubsub to push encrypted and signed notifications between two peers. Frame acts as a sort of coordination point to create this link and then as a client to receive payloads from peers. Still under heavy experimentation/development but even the existing PoC could be a good alternative to dapp email notifications.

Understandable, our initial goal is to discover if the community is open to a more general project like Frame being included in Flock.

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All the stuff you’re proposing to work on are awesome. Not debating that. In my mind the question is why Flock vs Nest or some other funding mechanism?Do you just want funds to build out infra, or do you want to get more involved in the Aragon community?

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Thanks @burrrata! Being involved in Nest has been great and we appreciate everything that program has to offer and the opportunities it provides, we’ve just outgrown it. We can’t support the whole team needed to grow Frame on the amount of funding Nest provides. We’re a team that has executed on our goals, released mainnet software and proven ourselves in this space. We believe in the Aragon vision and believe we return exponentially more value to the ecosystem than we take from it. We feel it’s important, now more than ever, to scale up our efforts/contributions and have a larger impact on making the Aragon vision a reality and is why we think we’re a good fit for Flock.

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Cool! Show me the proposal :slight_smile:

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Thanks for the post @jordan.

I will repeat here what I have in previous occasions, and what is only my personal opinion and not that of the Aragon Association.

I do not think that the Aragon Network has the financial ability at this time to fund Flock proposals that are not exclusively targeted to build Aragon core software.

If we look at the feature list provided above, it is clear that a very, very minor part is exclusively focused on Aragon - the vast majority (as it should be) is just general improvements that make Frame a great OS-level signing provider - but not something that I think we have the muscle to fund.

If the network deems that an OS-level signer is needed, then there should be a discussion about how to go about that, and seeing if Frame could provide that part - but the parts developed under the Flock grant should then belong to the Aragon community.

I don’t think it’s a good long term strategy for Aragon to fund third-party developers that can do anything to their product and code, and have no skin in the game nor alignment of incentives.

I really see two paths here:

  1. Get Frame as part of Aragon, to work exclusively for Aragon, as an Aragon-provided tool, Aragon-branded - if deemed like that’s worth a part of our limited budget.
  2. “Biz dev”-like deals to get the features we need implemented in the signers we think are more aligned. This could include funding some specific features with a contractual right to keep them in the product for X years.

With the limited budget we have, the amount of expenses we are accruing, duly noted in both AGP discussion: Annual budget for the Aragon Network
and Birds of a Feather - I just think we, very unfortunately, don’t have the luxury of being able to afford full-time teams not 100% embedded in the product.

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Hey @stefanobernardi, thanks for the feedback!

I disagree on the basis that exclusive focus on Aragon core software is a measurement of our value to the ecosystem or the impact we’ll have on Aragon’s success given the resources to do so. I also disagree that our focus on Aragon is “very, very minor” — even general improvements are prioritized based on Aragon’s needs, feedback and requests.

As an ANT holder and someone who believes it’s important for the Aragon vision to become a reality, I hope others see the extensive value we can add to the Aragon ecosystem and I hope, as a community, we choose to optimize a program like Flock for those outcomes.

Hey @jordan,

Personal views and questions here:

Thanks a lot for this proposal. I really liked using Frame v0.2 recently. When I use Aragon DAOs with Frame and my Ledger, I can really feel the value it creates for the user today.

However, a pending question for me is: can Aragon bet on Frame vs. other wallets/signing providers that have an already wider adoption and more advanced development (ex: mobile version) like Metamask? In a scenario where Frame cannot become more widely adopted than other wallets, would it still be the signing provider of choice for Aragon power users thanks to specific and powerful integrations (such as smart accounts)? Or will smart accounts be easy to build on top of Metamask & cie. as well?

How is Frame the single best choice that will make Aragon successful?

Some bureaucracy

Flock proposals have to be validated by the AA before community review period starts on October 3rd. So if you guys are planning to participate I invite you to submit a full proposal ASAP.

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Thanks @LouisGrx!

As a small team, we’re proud that we’ve been able to compete with much larger teams who have greater resources. We were a leader in hardware wallet support, having it before other platforms, and we’re still the leader in hardware support even after other platforms have adopted these features. We just released our smart accounts functionality and created a place where these accounts can really start to grow and thrive. We believe other platforms will adopt these features too but we’ve proven even when they do ,we can still lead the way and deliver the best experience. And soon we’ll also be a leader in running truly decentralized apps, again pushing the ecosystem forward in meaningful ways.

Joining Flock will help level the playing field. It will give us the resources we need grow and to support Aragon all platforms. For example, it will give us the ability to start building Frame on mobile and compete there — something we haven’t been able to do up until now purely due to resource constraints. As we mention in our proposal. We want to embark on deeper coordination within Aragon to provide support for any platform Aragon chooses to build on: desktop, mobile, Ethereum, Polkadot, IPFS, etc. We’re looking forward to working with current and future Flock/Nest teams to fulfill their needs at this layer and to create a unified effort towards wider adoption. Frame becoming part of Flock gives Aragon the ability to create, iterate, improve and maintain a path for users to go from zero knowledge to participating in a DAO. We think this is an important step.

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