Should Aragon One deploy Aragon Protocol with ANT as its staking token?

Update 2020-11-11: The ANT vote on this proposal has passed: https://snapshot.page/#/aragon/proposal/QmcLGPwfJtbB1Bt384iyXaK65sxYTERSJuwqRDqLs5Chca

Summary

We propose deploying an upgraded instance of Aragon Court as Aragon Protocol using ANT as its staking token.

Motivation

The Aragon Network aims to create a digital jurisdiction where new forms of digital organizations can thrive.

We saw early on that the need for a dispute resolution protocol was core to that vision’s success and started building a subjective oracle protocol (Aragon Court) in late 2018, as well as many other pieces of infrastructure to enable these types of organizations to succeed.

Currently, governance rights over the Court protocol are granted exclusively to ANT holders, and participation rights (to earn dispute and usage fees) in the Court are granted exclusively to ANJ holders. This separation was deemed necessary to isolate the incentives of Court participation from the incentives of other potential service protocols that might be created and connected to ANT in the future (eg Aragon Chain), and to ensure that the incentives of court participants were divergent enough to provide a check on the decision making power of a majority-rule based voting policy.

This structure positions the Aragon Network as a hub that deploys capital into the development of various connected protocols with the Court being one such protocol. However, it’s our position that this is not a good path forward for the network as it splits focus and creates factions which must vie for resources and attention. We believe it would be much wiser to focus all resources, attention, and efforts into developing, promoting, and building tooling to support a single Aragon Protocol.

With a singular focus, the separation of rights between ANJ and ANT become unnecessary. We do not need to worry about isolating incentives across multiple potential protocols, and can tune Aragon Protocol using time-based staking parameters to ensure there is sufficient divergence among participants in the protocol and the larger population of ANT holders participating in governance.

Specification

If this vote is approved:

  • Aragon One will audit and deploy an upgraded version of the original court protocol with some added enhancements such as modified time-based staking parameters, ruling delegation for cold/hot wallet setups, a more flexible payments system (giving the AN DAO ability to introduce custom payment models at runtime), and an improved upgrading process. Aragon One expects, but doesn’t commit to, Aragon Protocol to be live and operational before the end of 2020.
  • Aragon One’s deployed instance will be referred to as Aragon Protocol and will use ANT as its staking token.
  • Aragon Govern will use Aragon Protocol as its default resolver for optimistic vote challenges and subjective disputes over votes. Other products and projects developed by Aragon One paid for by Aragon Association grants will use Aragon Protocol if there’s a need for a subjective oracle.
  • Aragon One will immediately stop maintaining Aragon Court, and instead focus on building and enhancing Aragon Protocol.
  • Aragon One will shut down all infrastructure supporting Aragon Court no less than 45 days from this vote being approved. Given that all code is open source, a motivated party could easily run these services.
  • Aragon Association will not relicense the Aragon Court codebase nor any of its supporting services, and it will be kept available under the GPL-3.0 license or the current license the different components have (some parts are licensed under MIT and will be kept MIT licensed)

Additional community votes would be required to determine the future of ANJ and Aragon Court, whether there’s a merger of some kind, independence from the Aragon Network, or some other path forward. Aragon One is currently collaborating with Delphi Digital on a proposal to merge ANJ with ANT and provide additional rewards to ANJ holders who commit to locking up their ANT once they accept the merger offer. We will share more details about this proposal with the community as soon as possible.

Urgency

This proposal represents a critical decision for the community.

Reaching a decision where all stakeholders feel comfortable with the outcome is of the utmost importance. However, reaching a decision is a dependency for further development, strategic resource allocation, and the Aragon Govern upcoming launch, because these subsequent decisions depend a great deal on whether we are proceeding as a hub connecting many service protocols, or optimizing our resources to maximize the value of a single protocol.

Given the importance of this decision, we will be holding another town hall meeting on Aragon’s Discord tentatively happening on Thursday November 5th at 5pm UTC (final details to be confirmed closer to the date)

5 Likes

Hey Jorge & Team. Thanks for the hard work.

Question from a funny corner; why the renaming to Aragon Protocol?

Personally, one thing that attracts me to Aragon is the Court system. It represents conflict resolution just like a classical ‘Court’. Even though I realize it’s a not a ‘Court’ representing some fundamental law but rather is an oracle resolving conflicts based on human-readable Agreements, it does represent a court in the classical sense of it being a independent third party resolving a conflict by some laws (the Agreement).

Renaming the Aragon Court to Aragon Protocol makes the concept so much more abstract. I feel I confuse my mother 10x more if I tell her about the ‘Aragon Protocol’ than the ‘Aragon Court’.

I feel that’s line of thinking is also in line with this statement from the Aragon Manifest:

To be successful, we must keep our products open, understandable, and easy to use for everyone.

Not sure if I’m clearly getting my point across. What are other people’s thoughts? Am I missing something?

7 Likes

I think that’s a fair point, and I really really appreciate that you quote the Manifesto, we take it very seriously and abiding by it comes before the merits of any discrete decision.

Given the many different things that we expect the protocol to do and support, court felt too limiting of a word. I think it is weird to have a court be a scalability solution or an optimistic oracle for ETH2 headers (to mention just two applications that people are building on Aragon Protocol).

I now see the court being a part of the protocol, the one that deals with more subjective things that require human judgement (the original Aragon Court vision), but we don’t anticipate that being the majority of the protocol’s use, at least in the short term.

What are all the services/components of the Aragon protocol?
Are those Applications build on different components of the protocol?
Can you separate those components from each other or are they so interconnected that it’s hard to separate them?

I would get a clear overview over the protocol if you are going to list all the different Aragon Protocol services/components on aragon.org under the tab "services ". Perhaps you can then list all the different Protocol applications under those different protocol components/services.

Understood! That’s indeed the part I was missing; that the majority of work is not going to be resolving conflicts around human readable agreements.

That makes my fear that Aragon might become less intriguing to non-techy outsiders out of scope for this proposal.

I thought Aragon Court was the Court component of Aragon (Protocol).

From my perspective, you are basically describing what Aragon already appears to be.

You made Aragon Protocol (Aragon) and then you built Aragon Court on Aragon (Protocol) and now you are “wrapping” Aragon Court into a new thing called Aragon Protocol (I thought that was already Aragon?).

If it is a court system that you are talking about then what is wrong with Aragon Court? Especially considering how Aragon Court was already very effectively deputised as a child component of Aragon & ANT by virtue of being the only crypto pair in existence that was capable of minting and burning ANJ tokens.

Noting for readers on this thread that Aragon One has published a new blog post providing additional thoughts behind their decision to put forward this proposal:

1 Like

Now that the Jurors will become Guardians what is the new job skill requirements?
Will there be a ANT delegation tool / Aragon-Explorer similar to Cosmos Explorer “Mintscan” where you can become a guardian or stake your ANT on guardians? The more ANT staked the more secure ANT protocol. So it would be very good to have a tool to stake/delegate ANT and have a transparent overview about the state of the Aragon Protocol.
A MVP of this tool should be available when the Aragon Protocol launches so ANJ holders can delegate there converted ANJ-ANT to guardians or become guardians on which users can stake their ANT. I imagine an interface like this:

I like this diagram a lot! I think it is a bit confusing the name APPS cause there are also Apps/Extensions for DAOs. I would call the DAO Apps - DAO Extensions like in Wordpress and I would call the Protocol Apps - Protocol Services and the UIs dApps or Apps. Then you also have Aragon Products like Connect, DAOs and Agreements. What is the difference between Products and Services? As I understand products are the gateway between protocol services and UIs or UIs use Products to connect to protocol Services.

@jorge can you speak more to how you see the relationship working between the Aragon Network and Aragon Protocol as it relates to Aragon Network Agreement enforcement?

Under the status quo model, Agreement enforcement would be outsourced to Aragon Court, which is protected by activated ANJ holders who have their own isolated incentives to rule honestly even (perhaps especially!) in cases involving the Aragon Court governor, the Aragon Network. Under the new proposed model, ANT holders would be both governors of the Aragon Network and guardians of Aragon Protocol. So if there is a malicious proposal that goes against the Aragon Network Agreement, in the case that 100% of ANT holders are compelled to vote, 51% are voting yes then it starts to look like a 51% attack like scenario, and the only protection would be… also 51% of ANT holders who activate in Aragon Protocol to act as guardians who will rule on a dispute brought forth by someone in the 49% honest minority. This seems like a catch 22 or a recursive problem: 51% of ANT holders are presumed to be attackers, but they can also activate in Aragon Protocol and be drafted into the final dispute round and allow the proposal to go through even if it violates the Aragon Network Agreement.

What do you see as the protection mechanism there to prevent or discourage a hostile majority of ANT holders from capturing both Aragon Network governance and Aragon Protocol dispute resolution?

for example you could say that there are different roles in Aragon like Juror or Guardian etc… Each of the roles have different tasks and you need to stake ANT to enter those roles and perhaps even stake on different tasks. When you enter a role (or even task) a certain portion of the stake will get burned or put into ANDAO as a fee for register a new role (task). Stake on those roles will have a negative exponential curve, so at the beginning each ANT stake worth a multiple of 1 but as more and more ANT get staked the boost will go to 1. Users would more likely stake on roles where there is less ANT stake and a higher stake boost multiple to get more rewards.
Perhaps on top of that there is a way to work with brightID where verified BrightID users get an extra stake boost on top of the negative exponential curve. So users would more likely stake on brightID users cause they get an even higher stake-boost/ return compared to the standard registered role.

Here to report that this proposal has passed:

Now the community can come up with proposals about what the future should be for ANJ and Aragon court: