Jordan, thanks so much for this proposal - really great to see your continued commitment to the Aragon ecosystem!
I have a few comments on both the Flock path and the demo.
Flock:
I think that, strategically for Aragon, having a signing provider tightly integrated with the product, committed to the ecosystem, and in close touch with the rest of the developers is a massive value.
I do worry a bit about “competition” in the long term, meaning that there are tons of wallet providers that are raising substantial capital from VCs, and I worry that maintaining feature parity in the future against well-funded teams might be tricky - but for now, it doesn’t seem that anyone is really focused on providing OS-level and smart account infrastructure, as to make it a great field to play in.
That being said, this is a slightly different Flock application than all the other ones we have seen to date. Other teams have always focused on building key parts of the Aragon OS / product, and none have had a product that is “universal” like yours.
I make this consideration as a segway to talking about IP and the post-Flock (if any) path of a project like yours.
While I think it makes sense for Aragon to fund such efforts at this stage, I think there needs to be consideration to what could happen later down the road. If Frame stays a Flock team forever, then nothing to talk about. But if at some point the Network decides to stop funding for whatever reason OR if Frame decides to raise capital / charge for its product, there would be the question of who owns the IP generated and what issues that creates.
It’s clear that being OSS, anyone could pick up the development - but there might be other network effects or barriers to entry to keep in mind, and those are hard to imagine at this time.
Therefore I do think that if Aragon is the only funder of such efforts, it would make sense to have Frame even more tightly integrated in the Aragon family.
This could happen by branding Frame as a clear product offered by Aragon to the ecosystem (Aragon Frame or Frame by Aragon), implementing a bit more of Aragon-specific branding and having agreements for either the IP or repayment of capital / stake in the business if the grant funding and/or the association with Aragon is key to achieving that.
The reason for this is not to be greedy at the Aragon level, but rather align incentives and make sure that the Flock program is not seen as a risk-free, bootstrapping program by subsequent applicant teams.
Would love to get your, and the community’s, take on a tighter branding integration of Frame in case of a successful AGP.
UX:
It’s so awesome to see Agent and Smart Accounts in action! Thanks for putting time developing this!
One nitpick I have, and I know it’s early days, is that the flow is not particularly intuitive for a first time user (or even an experienced one).
Particularly the changing accounts from the Smart to the Hot ones feel like something that could be either automated or have clearer UI prompts.
Having a clear “Main Account” with Frame maybe, where then you can add signers and smart accounts, and have transactions be automatically routed to the correct one would make it an amazing experience.
Anyways, fun stuff to think about and work on.
we’re working on solutions. We also think there’s a promising possibility for personal smart accounts built on AragonOS (e.g. personal DAO smart accounts) that we’d like to work on in the future and would bring more users into the ecosystem.