Where will Aragon start?

The whitepaper lays out a very clever model for a working digital jurisdiction, but what Iā€™m missing is a bridge between today and a future where digital entities are a primary way we interact with each other and create things of value.

Who will be the first users of this digital jurisdiction? How will they find out about Aragon and be incentivized to use it? What features will they want to use first? To me, these questions are critical if we are to bring this amazing technology to the world.

There really wasnā€™t a good category for this, so I picked a random one. I would love a category for users/constituents where we can discuss these questions.

Thank you! Looking forward to your thoughts.

I agree definitely need to rethink the categories on here a bit, but for now this as good a place and we can probably move it if we restructure.


This will be a highly speculative response, but I will share my thinking about how adoption may play out for Aragon. Its definitely a grand vision that will take years to play out fully.

I think its helpful first bucket potential users into two categories, those who either feel strongly about their privacy/self-sovereignty or cannot associate their real world identity because they donā€™t have one and those who donā€™t care about those things but are interested in the transparency and security of running an organization on the blockchain.

For the sake communicating this in a fun way, lets call the first category Native Aragonians, and the second category Foreigners.

Native Aragonians can further be split into a group of highly technical users who are experimenting with protocols and DAOs that represent blockchain entities but are fundamentally incompatible with traditional and rigid definitions of a legal entity. Since we will reference this group again, lets call them Pioneers. The rest of the native Aragonians will likely be individuals under corrupt or dangerous government regimes that benefit from a jurisdiction that respects their self-sovereignty/privacy.

I expect the earliest users of Aragon (and not just the network) are the pioneers, we are already seeing adoption here from developers within the crypto ecosystem. They may create novel protocols/organizations that provide specific services (eg TCRs). As pioneers build interesting DAO based applications, it will attract other native Aragonians who see an immediate opportunity to earn crypto pseudoanonymously. As this economy develops it will get to a point where these organizations start to interact more abstractly, and thats when we may start see adoption of the aragon agreements and the court. One example of this is how we propose using agreements as a means to improve the court protocol and how we propose doing the price feed oracle for the reserves. It allows similar constructions as smart contract based protocols but with many of the advantages of human subjectivity.

In parallel I expect the group of foreigners to take some of the basic DAO infrastructure and create templates that bridge the divide between the physical world and Aragon. Things like legal entities that act as legal proxies for daos, or dao templates that designed to be connected directly to legal entities in a specific jurisidicitons ā€“ there is some movement to prepare for this is some existing jurisidictions like Malta, Wyoming, and Switzerland already.

Its possible that early on the economic value of foreigners will be much larger than the economic value native to aragon, its tempting to think we should try and extract a fee/tax but since everything is open source Its probably not wise. Overtime, as the native Aragon Economy grows in value, there will be increasing demand for native aragon DAOs to interact with Foreign companies (and vice versa), The foreign companies will already have blockchain interfaces and will be compatible with the Aragon Jurisidiction, but the Aragon Native organizations will be fundametally incompatible with traditional jurisidictions. So all interactions need to take place in the Aragon native jurisdiction.

From a speculators perspective, the value of ANT is as a currency that is optimized for use in collateralized agreements, so demand for ANT should increase as you see more interactions between Aragon Native organizations, and between Aragon Native organizations and Foreign companies.

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Thanks for the write-up @lkngtn, that nomenclature is amazing.

I agree with everything that Luke wrote, just wanted to focus on why it is important that ā€˜foreignersā€™ arenā€™t extracted any value. Foreigners, being a hybrid organization, with the limits and inefficiencies of their land jurisdiction, will also be exposed to how Aragon native DAOs operate, as they will probably be running the same software but limited to whatever the jurisdiction allows. Extracting value from them creates an incentive to fork the code and run without this fee and will also be an artificial barrier of entry.

They will be running in ā€˜jurisdiction x Aragon sandbox modeā€™ and we expect that the benefits of running a native DAO will be significant enough for organizations to grow out of the sandbox and become a true DAO. So by not putting any impediments for these organizations to be created, the Network is somewhat investing in a percentage of them becoming natives eventually (without going through any immigration process of course :sweat_smile::wink:).

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These are great points! I agree the breakdown of user types sounds fitting. It will be interesting to see how ā€œforeignersā€ come upon Aragon and why they use it. Whatā€™s the one-sentence pitch for why a traditional legal entity should operate in a sandbox or switch completely to a DAO? I suppose the answer is radically different depending on industry and jurisdiction (probably less demand for it in the US or EU, possibly much more for those living under corrupt regimes as you mentioned).

The no-fee-for-foreigners model makes me think of ā€œfreemiumā€ pricing for SaaS products!

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Whatā€™s the one-sentence pitch for why a traditional legal entity should operate in a sandbox or switch completely to a DAO?

Using a template that is associated with a jurisdiction that allows managing shares on a blockchain entity (there are several that already allow this, and many more with pending legislation) is pretty compelling compared to typical record keeping process. Some of the advantages of tokenization of traditional securities are covered in this excellent article: The Security Token Thesis | HackerNoon

True, for record keeping that is much easier. I believe Delaware allows this now, but I am not sure what their criteria for a blockchain is (since a one node blockchain is just a database). If Ethereum and ANT is recognized as a fitting chain, I suppose the Aragon UI would be a convenient way for companies to create and manage their tokenized shares?