[Vote now] Sunset Aragon Chain in favor of Aragon on Ethermint

[jorge]

Summary

Aragon One proposes for ChainSafe to discontinue development of Aragon Chain and its ANT-linked staking token ARA, and instead, focus their efforts on deploying Aragon’s DAO infrastructure to the project-agnostic Ethermint Cosmos Zone. Aragon One will continue its work developing community-driven projects like Optimistic Snapshot and other Ethereum centric scaling solutions.

Rationale

Aragon Chain was originally announced in October 2019 and funded by the Aragon Association after ANT holders signalled their approval on AGP-106. Since the proposal was approved Aragon Chain’s development has mostly consisted of developing Ethermint itself.

The main motivation for Aragon Chain was to allow Aragon organizations to operate more affordably by reducing the cost of transaction fees otherwise incurred on Ethereum mainnet. During that time we have seen alternatives like xDai, that provide similar cost savings, gain significant traction within the community.

We’ve also seen off-chain voting solutions like Snapshot quickly become the scalable and low cost voting standard on Ethereum. Emerging L2 solutions like Optimistic Snapshot have quickly become the primary focus of Aragon One’s development efforts and have attracted huge interest from projects in the community.

We believe the Aragon community and its resources should go towards collaboration on these solutions within the broader Ethereum community, rather than building a standalone Aragon Chain.

This proposal does not intend to permanently close the door to an Aragon-specific chain. We aim to maintain our close relationship with ChainSafe and stay up-to-date on opportunities for developing an Aragon-specific chain, if and when it makes sense.

We still believe that Aragon’s tools should be available everywhere, including Ethermint, which we propose should be made available on the soon-to-be-announced Ethermint Chain.

Specification

The poll for this proposal will be held on Snapshot for 48 hours with a 50% approval threshold and no quorum.

If this proposal is approved, the following will be enacted:

• ChainSafe and Aragon One discontinue the development of Aragon Chain and ARA.
• ChainSafe will deploy and maintain Aragon’s tooling to the upcoming Ethermint chain.
• Aragon One will monitor opportunities for deploying an ANT-linked Aragon chain in the future.
• Aragon One will continue to support community driven scaling solutions like Optimistic Snapshot and other sidechains where applicable.

[45freehold]

What would be the pros and cons of each decision?
Why would Aragon want to move off Ethereum when Eth 2.0 is promising similar benefits?
Would it really be beneficial for the project to be spread across several chains?

Just a few questions that come to mind that I think would be useful to discuss. I don’t know much about the Cosmos network, thus apologise in advance if something is too obvious to ask.

[andriytyurnikov]

That is quite a bundle.

Looks like somehow Aragon getting heavily involved in development of core blockchain technology, instead of using it.

[Mouyou]

I like the proposal. Just to understand: Aragon will deploy on Ethermint so that users have more choices to run their Aragon DAO with all the Apps and tools on Ethereum or any Ethermint Chain? Aragon Chain wants / wanted to do the same, more choices for users, but Ethermint offers more choices for users compared to the single Aragon Chain?

[xuhcc]

Long overdue!
I also fully support the idea of rebranding Aragon Court to Aragon Protocol and making it central to Aragon Network. Now the ANT-ANJ merger and repurposing of ANT makes more sense to me. If done right, that should better align incentives of ANT holders with DAO users.

[mars]

I was genuinely worried the Aragon is spreading resources too thin.

Sunsetting chain - HELL YEAH.

Eliminate stuff that is not essential. Full support to this proposal.

[jomarip]

Did I miss this vote? Can we get some additional notification on stuff like this?

[jack]

@45freehold

Why would Aragon want to move off Ethereum when Eth 2.0 is promising similar benefits?

The Aragon Network, its tokens, Court, and tooling are staying on Ethereum regardless of this proposal. We’ll continue to build L2 DAO solutions on Ethereum and will be first in line when Eth 2.0 becomes available. In the meantime, we want Aragon’s tools (aragonOS, client, etc.) to be available on other chains. This proposal is merely saying the Aragon tools should be deployed on the EVM friendly Ethermint chain, rather than launching a dedicated Aragon Chain with its own token on Ethermint.

@45freehold

Would it really be beneficial for the project to be spread across several chains?

As I said before, Aragon’s already open source tools would be deployed on Ethermint. In the context of DAOs more broadly, having Aragon’s tools available on different chains means more DAOs in more places which is good for Aragon’s overall mission. For example, 1Hive deployed the Aragon client to xDai to take advantage of the low cost transaction fees.

@andriytyurnikov

Looks like somehow Aragon getting heavily involved in development of core blockchain technology, instead of using it.

Aragon One’s primary focus is off-chain, optimistic scaling solutions for DAOs that settle on Ethereum. We’ll occasionally provide support to developers deploying Aragon to other chains but since the chains mentioned are EVM compatible porting them over is generally pretty straightforward. If anything, this proposal would have the opposite effect of what you suggest.

@Mouyou

Aragon will deploy on Ethermint so that users have more choices to run their Aragon DAO with all the Apps and tools on Ethereum or any Ethermint Chain? Aragon Chain wants / wanted to do the same, more choices for users, but Ethermint offers more choices for users compared to the single Aragon Chain?

The key difference is that Aragon would not have a dedicated Aragon Chain staking token (ARA) linked to ANT.

@jomarip

Did I miss this vote? Can we get some additional notification on stuff like this?

No you didn’t miss it, it starts tomorrow, October 20. You can read more details here: https://aragon.org/blog/sunsetting-aragon-chain

Good question, we do have notifications for this but I don’t think sign-ups have been available since the old Aragon Network Votes. Will report back here when I have an answer for you!

Update: You can fIll out this form to be notified by email about new votes!
https://one.us15.list-manage.com/subscribe?u=a590aa3843a54b079d48e6e18&id=9b7f365936

[jacklaing]

I think this proposal makes a lot of sense given its alignment with Aragon’s longstanding strategy of building modular/composable governance tools. The more ways to use Aragon the better.

To provide some context on another use case, at pokt.network we’re about to launch an off-chain governance model that uses Discord bots, airdrops, and Snapshot to achieve a frictionless UX for community members. We were therefore very excited to see Aragon One embracing Snapshot, so that we can use Aragon Court as part of this flow, and are excited to see Aragon One continuing to narrow their focus.

[jack]

The vote for this proposal is now live on Snapshot:
https://snapshot.page/#/aragon/proposal/QmWXJvo5zXA2uSgMMCLSyFgwxnpHKP2D7NM4RqDriNjEwo