Hey @ronald_k! I know you’ve just addressed this, but can you please confirm if article 67/1 of the Swiss Civil Code can be derrogated by the Articles of Association? I’d consider the provisions of the CC in any jurisdiction as mandatory, meaning that parties cannot specify differently from the general law. This would be a blocker to having quadratic voting of ANT holders in the General Assembly of the Verein (differently that 1 member = 1 vote).
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Yes you can derogate from 1 member 1 vote. The distinction must, however, be bases on objective criteria. There are already associations existing with quadratic voting see HOPR (zefix.ch)
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Thank you, @ronald_k Perhaps you could please provide a copy of the Articles of Association of HOPR? There is also HOPR as a commercial company (HOPR Services AG), but the Aragon Association is a Verein. It’s fine having distinctive voting rights in a commercial company, as we all know. However, the scope of any association is that all members should be treated equally, and have the same power, as one member, one vote. At least this is the understanding in EU jurisdictions. The Swiss CC is also very clear on this subject and IMHO does not leave any space for anyone to construct against this: (67/1 “All members have equal voting rights at the general meeting”). I may be wrong, obviously, and I’m keen to learn from you, but I’ve never seen differently in any association (not even in FIFA). I’d suggest quadratic voting is implemented in the DAO, not in the Verein, and the DAO members elect delegates to the Verein Executive Committee (or even the GM). Thanks, @ronald_k! I appreciate your patience, but I believe it’s worth discussing it in advance. Best! JN
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The post that started this thread now presents an updated version of the proposal, together with a link to the initial draft. The next step would be for the DAO to get to a soft consensus around the vote text that will include several multiple choice questions. I’m hopeful that the initial draft of the vote text will be published for community review some time in the first half of next week.
@fartunov @joeycharlesworth @alibama @Tayy @brent @luis @GriffGreen @lee0007 @eaglelex @b3n @AClay @ramon @ronald_k @Brian @Anthony.Leuts @Sixto5 @daniel-ospina @Joan_Arus @alex-kampa @mheuer @Gabriela @josenuno
Thank you all for contributing to this discussion!
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Would ANT Incentive package beneficiaries be able to delegate unvested ANT?
I believe this would be a must if we want to ensure that contributors can meaningfully participate in the direction of the project.
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They have answered and they do see such transfer as an ending of the initial Aragon Association project and therefore the normal taxation applies, meaning for the transfer of CHF 200 Mio to the Network DAO the taxes of approx. CHF 19 mio. would need to be paid.
They are actually not taking a hard stand they are just following the initial tax ruling according to which the funds were not taxed upon receiving but only upon spending and upon termination of the project within the Association.
here you go for the separate forum for a tax discussion or better understanding:
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Non-vested packages may never be received by the beneficiaries (eg. in case their contract is terminated by any reason, including incompetence, non-delivery, etc., before the vesting period). Therefore, granting a beneficiary of future and eventual tokens the right to vote, or to delegate, in any decision, would represent that the he/she has fullfilled all commitments to the project, what may never be the case. If so, then also all duties and responsibilities attached should correspondently be assumed concerning the same tokens, such as declaring as voting rights and paying taxes accordingly.
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Important clarification, thank you! This topic may need a separate discussion.
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Gm @mlphresearch! It would be greatly appreciated if we could get some more transparency who requested this change (from 2 years runway to 6 months) and on what grounds. This is not apparent neither in the thread here nor in the working drafts I and others contributed towards.
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This suggestion came from AA. @joeycharlesworth can provide additional details but I think it makes sense to sync funding with implementing the new governance system as more work gets distributed across the various sub-DAOs/guilds.
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Thank you for the clarification. So this came from the AA Committee, not the AA team, for the sake of public transparency this distinction is important
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Still happy with the direction of the proposal overall. One point bellow though:
I think this change will be a sticking point, there really should be runway of 12 months due to this change. The DAO will take probably 3-5 months of structuring and moving the team in to this with little clarity, of what they are moving in to will be challenging. It could be 12 months once the DAO structure is set.
Is there an option to include different options on the vote for timeline on this topic?
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I’ve suggested three options for the soft deadline question: Nov 30 (2022), Feb 28 (2023), and Abstain (can be interpreted as “neither”). I view the June vote as a signal vote on the general direction; the dates will need to be reviewed in the context of a detailed implementation plan.
EDIT: Assuming that the proposal passes and the delegative voting system gets implemented, it can be used for making any additional budgetary allocations (which may be required anyway depending on how things progress over the next 3-5 months). Like I said, I personally found it rational to sync funding with implementing the new governance system but if folks have strong opinions on this, please share on the forum so they can be taken into account during the vote.
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Hi guys and sorry for joining the party late.
As an AA Core member and a Swiss citizen participating in a lot of associations (Verein) in private, I am in favor of making every DAO member / ANT holder a member of the association.
I agree with the move to a more decentralized Aragon and giving the power to the community but having only a runaway of 6 months could push a lot of core members into a fight/flight mode where we will lose a lot of knowledge, great talent, and power. Which could slow down the project or bring it to a complete stop.
How I/we currently work in other associations is quite simple and more decentralized than I have seen in a lot of other DAOs. For sure these steps need improvements to completely obey the Aragon Manifesto but as a first step, I think they are great.
- Every year there is a general assembly where we vote on these topics (mostly in this order):
- Approval of the annual reports from the committee
- Approval of the financial statements of the previous year
- Approval of this year’s budget
- Electing a committee (1 president, 1 vice president, 1 cashier, multiple operative leaders)
- Electing 2 auditors
- if the committee needs more money than in the budget there will be an out of order assembly to vote on the requested funds
- The teams are independent and work within their financial boundaries (controlled by the complete committee)
- The committee meets every month (can be increased to weekly if necessary) and the notes are publicly available to all members
This move will allow Aragon to benefit from a legal wrapper AA which is governed by the members and avoid a huge tax loss outlined by @Gabriela
EDIT:
Each DAO squad / team / guild or however we wanna call it could have its own committee member(s) and their own budget to run from, which will increase the functionality of the DAO and hopefully prevent vote weary (getting tried of voting all the time)
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Please note that the dates in the proposal are somewhat arbitrary. If the DAO decides to move in this direction, everyone affected should be included in working out a concrete implementation plan, which may involve revising the dates, and possibly running additional votes. On this, I’m more than happy to defer to folks who have a better grasp of what’s preferable/feasible once the DAO has decided whether it wants to take the on-chain route or not. The transition will obviously need to be handled carefully. Apologies if the proposal is not clear enough on these details. Keep providing your perspectives, esp. if you feel that something critically important is not receiving the attention it deserves!
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Hi everyone and thanks for this amazing discussion. Sorry to join late in the conversation.
As a Brand Designer of the Aragon One team (previously) and AA team (currently), this is not my area of expertise, but after reading all your interesting thoughts I position myself as a more realistic solution to add the ANT holders as a member of the AA.
As @joeycharlesworth t mentioned before,
The Aragon Association articles can be amended to enable ANT holders to stake ANT in order to be members of the General Assembly and as a result, ANT holders could effectively be deciding who should be elected onto the Aragon Association committee.
This is for me the most realistic approximation to a decentralized solution that could benefit holders & make them part of the future decisions.
As a part of the AA team, working hard every day to bring a really top-notch product to the market with the rest of the AA and AL coworkers I want to highlight this important point from @ramon and bring it back again to this conversation:
- Aragon Association and Aragon Labs have assembled an excellent core product and tech team that is super motivated to deliver an amazing DAO platform. That being said, having a runaway of around 2 years for Aragon Labs looks like a good compromise between having skin in the game and personal safety, but might still be perceived by some contributors as a deadline that doesn’t have clear goals on how to be extended. How do the proposers see this potential issue (losing motivation, knowledge, etc) if the proposal passes? Are there some interesting previous examples that we could rely on?
Could be great if we can define the next future steps if finally this proposal passes and thinking about the new scenario for the AA and AL team members, that would be good to advance expectations.
As @luis said:
It’s what we always wanted since the Aragon token sale in 2017, which couldn’t happen during those early years due to lack of infrastructure. If we had working DAOs in 2017, we wouldn’t have opened a legal entity to raise funds in the first place – it would have been a DAO.
Since the creation of the first whitepaper (5 years ago) this was the initial idea, for this reason, I know this is the correct direction and decision, but I would like to minimize the risk to break the good traction & motivation that we are creating in this team.
Thanks 
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Hey all!
As one of the co-founders, I thought I’d chime in and provide some light on the original vision, and its rationale.
The idea of Aragon has always been quite revolutionary, as you know. Because of such nature, it has historically attracted top-notch talent and produced quite an aura around the project. Fight for Freedom (which we all know) plus this interview I did in 2017 (Aragon's Luis Cuende interview with Cheddar from the NYSE trading floor - YouTube) reflect the original ideals. We were outcasts. We were revolutionaries.
The idea was for the Aragon Network DAO to be a jurisdiction for DAOs, and for ANT holders to be its governors. While I understand that a way to decentralize the treasury (if there was no other way) is to involve ANT holders in the AA and in a sovereign AN DAO, if there’s a way to make the AN DAO sovereign (which there is), why not do it?
Putting it simply: is there any more significant way to corrupt that vision, than to make the jurisdiction we wanted dependent on a trad jurisdiction? A DAO should be a DAO, a DAO should run on-chain and without any trad jurisdiction having a say over it. Now we seem to have the opportunity to achieve that. Let’s do it.
On the matter of the runway for the AA/AL teams: Aragon has always had that massive contradiction. We build DAO tooling, but we are scared to operate as a DAO. I could understand that when we started (there was no DAO tooling, and not even DeFi!), but now the tooling is so advanced that dogfooding and switching to a full-on DAO model is a no-brainer. The earliest, the better. Everyone inside Aragon, a project that builds decentralized governance tools, should be comfortable working under a decentralized model. Otherwise it’s a big hypocrisy that will only stop us from being seen as a genuine project.
PS: Even though right now I have a strong opinion about this, as an AA committee member I will support whatever ANT holders choose (within the boundaries of legality and morality) and will not be a blocker to decisions that I myself don’t agree with.
Best,
Luis
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Dear JN, as said, it is possible to have different voting schemes than 1 vote 1 member, as long as such deviation is justified by objective criteria. Here is the example from HOPR. You can download the full articles via zefix.ch.
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