Luis Cuende, the CEO of Aragon One, describes the Aragon Network, how it aims to create new systems better for human coordination and the roles of the various parts of the ecosystem, such as Aragon One, the Aragon Association, the Aragon Court, Aragon Nest and the Aragon Network token. He describes the various parts of the Aragon Network, such as a finance app and voting app, how the network can be used both by decentralized organizations as well as centralized companies, and how he thinks decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) interact with real-world legal jurisdictions. We discuss how disputes are handled in Aragon, what the token, ANT, is used for, and why Aragon is contemplating building its own blockchain instead of sitting atop Ethereum, as it currently does. We also talk about how Aragon is governed, how it hopes to someday decentralize its governance and other ways Aragon can reach Cuende’s ideal governance. Plus, we cover a few controversial votes in Aragon and the role of whales in such systems.
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Episode links:
Aragon Network: https://aragon.org/network/
Luis Cuende: https://twitter.com/licuende?lang=en
Aragon white paper: https://github.com/aragon/whitepaper
Breaker Mag article about Aragon: https://breakermag.com/can-aragon-make-decentralized-autonomous-governance-work/
Vitalik Buterin’s proposals on DAICOs: https://ethresear.ch/t/explanation-of-daicos/465
Aragon Governance Proposals (AGP): https://github.com/aragon/AGPs/blob/master/AGPs/AGP-1.md
Vote against funding Polkadot: https://www.coindesk.com/voters-on-ethereum-app-veto-proposal-to-fund-polkadot-blockchain
Unchained episode about Polkadot: https://unchainedpodcast.com/paritys-jutta-steiner-and-gavin-wood-on-polkadot-substrate-and-the-frozen-funds/
Unchained episode about Ethereum 2.0: https://unchainedpodcast.com/vitalik-buterin-on-whether-or-not-ethereum-is-blowing-it/
Unchained episode with Ameen Soleimani of MolochDAO: https://unchainedpodcast.com/molochdao-could-this-decentralized-autonomous-organization-help-ethereum-scale-faster/
Stats on Aragon: https://scout.cool/aragon/mainnet
Unchained episode about Melon protocol: https://unchainedpodcast.com/how-melon-could-make-asset-management-easier/
Autark, the decentralized SpaceX: https://www.autark.xyz
Transcript:
Laura Shin:
Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, your no-hype resource for all things crypto. I’m your host, Laura Shin. In case you haven’t heard, I have another crypto podcast called Unconfirmed. It’s shorter, newsier and comes out Fridays. If you haven’t yet, go subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts. Also, find out what I think are the top stories in crypto by signing up for my weekly newsletter at Unchainedpodcast.com.
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Laura Shin:
My guest today from Berlin is Luis Cuende, the CEO at Aragon One. Welcome, Luis.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Thanks for having me.
Laura Shin:
What problem are you trying to solve with Aragon?
Luis Cuende:
The thing that we are trying to solve with Aragon is that human governance is very broken both at like the micro level, like the way we interact with each other and the way we organize. It’s very hard for someone in the world that is in Argentina to organize with someone from Iran for example because of multiple revelations that make it almost impossible, but also the macro level like governance is broken and democracy is I would say in the latter stages of growth and wanted to come out with new systems that are better for human coordination as we have seen out in the West with like Donald Trump winning the US elections and stuff like that.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Well, actually so what makes you say that democracy is in the last stages of growth?
Luis Cuende:
Well, I think if you look like technical revolutions they have this period sometime in which they have like early adopters and then they grow and then they have like this kind of proletary plateauing which they kind of stabilize over time and that means that we have taken the most out of them and now there is time for a new thing to come up and I think we have taken out the most of democracy already, at least in the West and now new models have to come that are better for human coordination and maybe even they come in new forms. Maybe they come in the form of smaller communities that coordinate between them instead of having like these huge monoliths so that we can see the nation of states that are like hundreds of millions of people. So, I think it’s time to experiment with new models.
Laura Shin:
And so, what does ideal governance look like to you?
Luis Cuende:
Well, I think that’s a very hard question because that depends so much on like the actual like governance model that we are looking and the problem we’re trying to solve. I think in terms of nation of states it’s very hard to empathize with millions of people and I think that’s the number one problem in society today. Like we cannot empathize with another citizen because there are like a hundred million citizens in a country and they are so different from one another and so I think if we can start dividing that into like smaller units that a way Dunbar’s number which is the number of people your brain can empathize with, I think we may have better communities rather than having this monolith nation of states in which everyone starts fighting each other.
Laura Shin:
But what is Dunbar’s number? Isn’t that a really low number, like 150 or something?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Like 150, yeah.
Laura Shin:
So, the world should be governed in little communities of 150 people?
Luis Cuende:
That’s what I really want to experiment with. I would love to try that out, try having the smaller communities also improves meaning in life as I think we have a crisis of meaning right now. So, like my generation for example like there are literally like social apps in like Finland and north of Europe to like connect like teenagers because they feel isolated and that’s so crazy to me today with like Instagram and Facebook and all these things, we feel more and more alone than any other time in life.
Laura Shin:
And your generation meaning, like how old are you?
Luis Cuende:
I’m 23 right now.
Laura Shin:
And actually, why don’t you tell a little bit about your story. How did you get into the blockchain space?
Luis Cuende:
For sure. So, I went into software when I was 12 years old because of Linux and free software and it was kind of my mind blowing to me because I come from a humble family and the fact that you could basically get a computer and you just start creating stuff and there was no limit. There was no need to like go to the store and buy anything at all. It was all for free and open. That was mind blowing for me and also that post capitalistic sort of like idea that people were working for free on the internet and they were like writing for software for other people use it without any expectation of profit.
I didn’t understand the reasoning behind and I’m not sure I understand it yet but it was so mind blowing for me and then I saw Bitcoin in 2009 when their white paper came out and I thought it was a scam. I thought like this is technically impossible. I didn’t really even read the white paper and then in 2011 I read the white paper and I was mind blown. It was around the financial crisis that hit Spain very bad where I’m from and also it hit my family very bad and when I read the whole white paper at the end I was like, oh my god, this is going to change the power dynamics of the world so much and I really want to be involved.
Laura Shin:
Wow. Okay. All right. And then I guess why don’t you briefly fill us in on how you came from that point to launching Aragon.
Luis Cuende:
Yes. In 2013 or ’14 I really got involved more and more into the bitcoin space. I was doing some small projects here and there but then I wanted to do a bitcoin exchange with a couple of partners I had back in the day and that didn’t work out because of like we couldn’t basically raise money for it, and then in 2014 we came up with Stampery, which is blockchain timestamping basically. I think it’s one of the main platforms that are doing that now although it took a long time for it to get any sort of traction. So, we launched that startup for people to like timestamp. We had the dream of like eliminating other republics using the blockchain which was a pretty obvious use case, right, but then these things take a lot of time. And then in 2016 I went out of the blockchain space for like a few months to pursue something with my now co-founder Jorge, which we met when were like 16.
Laura Shin:
Jorge. What’s his last name?
Luis Cuende:
Jorge Izquierdo. Yeah. We met when we were like 15 or 16 in Spain via Twitter and we were both like young hackers and then we started working on multiple things and then in 2016 I asked him to join a crazy idea I had related to patents and basically eliminating the patent system, and then at some point we moved to the US with the whole like Silicon Valley thing and at some point, we realized that the underlying issue wasn’t really the patent system in the US for example. It was politicians and the power dynamics that you don’t want to change it. You just want to keep the patent trolls trolling and these big companies to own these patents so they can have huge monopolies, and so at some point we figured out the underlying issue was governance of the country and of the law system and not patent themselves, so we came out with Aragon.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Also, do you remember that interviewed you once about Stampery?
Luis Cuende:
Seriously?
Laura Shin:
I did.
Luis Cuende:
Wow.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. But the very first question I asked you was how you prevent lies or falsehoods from getting on the blockchain and I’m just going to tell you straight, you didn’t have a good answer for it so I was like…
Luis Cuende:
I still don’t, I think.
Laura Shin:
What?
Luis Cuende:
I still don’t have a good answer.
Laura Shin:
Right and you were saying you wanted it to be notary system so I was like okay, this is like so far away from being that, but anyway. All right. So, before we get into Aragon why don’t we just like define a few things because there’s the Aragon Network, there is Aragon Association, there’s Aragon One. So, why don’t just like high level overview describe the whole set up.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly. Yeah. So, Aragon itself is the project and the movement that has the mission to create decentralized organizations for the world and to basically allow the people to experiment with governance at the speed of software, and so for that we have the Aragon Network, we have the Aragon Association, a few other entities, and so we have this multiteam model in which instead of having one team that grows to like a thousand people, we want to decentralize also development and so we have this model in which the holders of a token, that is the Aragon Network token can vote proposals to basically govern the whole project, and so one of the proposals for one of the ways that they can do that is to choose the development teams that are going to carry development.
And so, Aragon One is a team I lead and that’s the foundational team working on Aragon’s development but there is also Aragon Black, Autark and there are many other Aragon teams that are working on the ecosystem. Then there is the Aragon Network and the Aragon Network is like the broad sort of DAO that governs the project itself and it also wants to provide services to other DAOs, and so for example one of them is the Aragon Court. We want to create a dispute resolution system for DAOs so they can use the right code which is like smart contracts but they can also use wet code which is basically like human written agreements that we are very used to in like the traditional world let’s say, so we can combine the best of both worlds. So, that’s really the overview. Then we have also a grants program called Aragon Nest that has been giving out grants for multiple things. We were the first ones to give grants for Ethereum 2.0 development but that’s sort of the fine overview of the ecosystem.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Yeah, and early on when you talked about Aragon One, for listeners who know kind of how Ethereum development happened there was a period early on where there was the Ethereum Foundation and then EthDev was the company that formed to do the development for the network. All right. So, then why don’t we just start with what it is and what people can do if they want to use this system.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, right now we have the Aragon Client which is this app that allows you to create decentralized organizations and so you can do multiple things. You can for example create a membership for your organization which you can literally just list members and manage fans for example. That’s a very easy use case that can be paired in the Ethereum community with other kind of DAOs, like Moloch comes to mind and stuff like that, right, in which you have a group of friends and then they put funds in and then they match funds. It’s a very easy use case but then you can have like use cases that I think are a little more ambitious that are more like open DAOs in which anyone can join.
Laura Shin:
Well, wait. Actually, but to go back to the membership one. Is that like a centralized type of entity using the Aragon Network?
Luis Cuende:
No. It’s like decentralized kind of entity that you create on Aragon and then it’s basically like a permission in the sense that people have to vote for new members to come in but that will be something that will live on the Ethereum blockchain will be like fully decentralized.
Laura Shin:
Oh, I see.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. And then there is use cases that are more in terms of like open DAOs and so one of them that we are super excited about is fundraising. So, this model proposed called DAICOs and this model proposed by Luke from our team also called Apiary, and so what we’re doing here is we’re basically creating a DAO that fundraises money and then the token holders can decide to set what’s called the top rate and so that’s the amount of like money that flows to development teams to implement these ideas for this project, and so the good thing there is that basically you are like embarking the power structure. So token holders are the ones that control the project and the money flows the other way around. So basically, I think with that you can have fundraisers that are like 2017 scale, like very big fundraisers but with accountability and transparency that we didn’t see in 2017. So, that’s the model that I’m super excited about.
Laura Shin:
And did that pass?
Luis Cuende:
Well, that’s going to be launched in a couple of weeks from now.
Laura Shin:
Oh, okay. Yeah. Because he’s blogged about that for quite a while, I think.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Okay.
Luis Cuende:
I mean in the DAO space there’s always like it takes some time to actually implement things because everyone is so afraid of like consequences. When the DAO happened and before it happened and all of that, it took years until like someone literally said like we’re going to implement DAOs again because those things that people are really fearful about and I think like fundraising is the thing that people are very fearful about as well because you’ve got implications and the SSC and all of these things, but that shouldn’t impede us for innovating. That’s why we are here, right. I’m personally not here to see that like they are SEC compliant. I see what’s happening. Like I don’t really care about that.
Laura Shin:
Oh, really.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. I mean I didn’t get into this space to like basically facilitate the life for the nation of state. I go into this space so we can replace the nation of state.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Well, so to tie all that together I did want to ask you about this fact that you’re trying to build a DAO because given the history with the DAO that might seem kind of bold to some people because that was a huge failure. So, why did you decide to build a DAO and a platform for DAOs?
Luis Cuende:
Well, when we looked at the DAO it was interesting because you look at it and the idea itself was really great and the problem was the implementation but it’s one of those cases where it was very unfortunate that it was called dead DAO because then the whole DAO concept just got basically screwed over for years, but if you look at it like the concept itself is a brilliant concept. The problem was the implementation and so if you’re rational you think let’s just make an implementation that works and we invested a lot of money and time into making sure that this gets audited and I think we’re in like a year and some months with no bugs found or critical ones at least. So, super happy about that.
Laura Shin:
All right. So, we’ll just talk about the platform. So, you kind of actually walked through this a little bit so if I have a simple DAO like a membership thing, I can do that. So actually, talk about some of the other features that people can implement.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, there is a system with multiple apps that you can install and uninstall. You can think about it like Lego bricks, like basically you can build very basic or very complex structures just by putting together these bricks that are very generic, and so by default there is like a finance app which allows you to manage finances and then you can send the URL to anyone for them to check the finances in a transparent way. There’s voting now that allows you to vote on stuff. There’s stock and manager app that allows you to like manage stock and balances, means tokens for people, slash them as well. So, you can do all of those things and then there are more apps that are kind of not by default but they are super important as well.
So, for example there is this suite of apps for Aragon called open enterprise that allows people to manage more like open organizations and so for example you can have something like Gitcoin where you find bounties and people can come and claim those bounties and directly on Aragon DAO. You can have like a Dot voting app which is kind of organization for voting. You can have like an allocations app that allows you to have like multiple kind of bank accounts inside a DAO that are controlling different ways and waiting for permissions of like who can withdraw money.
So, you can do all of these things that are very composable. I think right now we are starting to have people actually use it for something because when you create a platform like in the end Aragon is like a platform for these apps to be built and then we just have to create new organizational structures but I think the interesting point is when you start having a critical mass in which you can like these components in different ways to create new models and that’s where like composability get seen and I think that’s something that worked out very well for Ethereum and now we’re starting to see that for Aragon although it takes a little bit to like building a platform to like see how people use it and compose the things.
Laura Shin:
And so just to clarify something because when I was browsing the materials about Aragon, for some reason I got under the conception that companies could use it and obviously companies are centralized. So, is that true or not true?
Luis Cuende:
Well, you can definitely implement a centralized hierarchal company on Aragon. Like for example Aragon One will use Aragon but we are like a Swiss company and we use it for finances, we use it for…yeah. It’s finances and voting. So, you can definitely do that. I think the issue there is the legal part of it. So, for example in our case we implemented the institutional in the finance app so you can export a CSV because our accountants really wanted to and I think if you want to do simple stuff like you may use Aragon but if you want to do something more complex you may want to use some kind of like legal wrapper.
So, there is this project called OpenLaw and they build these very cool integration with Aragon and Wyoming LLCs. So, we have this online wizard in which you can create an LLC and it automatically creates an Aragon DAO and it links both. So, you have legal agreements that literally say like members are going to be defined and services are going to be defined by this token app on Aragon. So, when you create a token on Aragon you automatically basically is a legal way of saying that’s a user on the Wyoming LLC. So, that’s a very cool use case as well.
Laura Shin:
How did that come about?
Luis Cuende:
It was a few months ago a community member called Ross from OpenLaw and he just made it happen. I think they’re looking to expand to like New York LLC as well.
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. It’s very cool.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. I know Caitlin Long was like really instrumental in getting a lot of blockchain friendly laws passed in Wyoming. So, I wondered if she was part of that but actually something else I wanted to ask about was earlier when you were talking about like they’re composable and like you can make different kinds of organizations, so how are people using them and like are you seeing any innovative uses that you hadn’t really thought of before.
Luis Cuende:
Well, it was funny. So like way before we came up with Aragon fundraising and implementing this fundraising mechanism on Aragon, we saw a DAO that was basically they were like a like a smart contract that would basically use the finance app on Aragon and the tokens app on Aragon so that if there was a new post to the finance app that would need a new token for that member, so respectively fundraising before we implement the fundraising and that was really fun to see. It’s actually a very cool project and one of my I think favorite use cases, most of the developers are based in Iran so of course like if you are based there you’re automatically discriminated in the whole world. So, like I think Aragon was one of the only ways that they could have fundraise to do their software and their project.
Laura Shin:
Wow. So, this is actually a perfect segue to my next question because I was wondering, so obviously we’ve got like the normal traditional legal jurisdictions all around the world, so how did those laws fit with or not fit with these entities that you’re creating on Aragon?
Luis Cuende:
Well, it’s the intersection between dry code and wet code which is what Nick Szabo used to call those things.
Laura Shin:
And just clarify that for people. So wet code is like human courts of law and then dry code is like code.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly, computer code. Yeah. Smart contracts. And that’s super interesting because for example when I think about declaring taxes, right, so you want to declare your taxes. You see your crypto portfolio but then, how you declare a CDP? How do you declare an NFT? How you declare an asset that may be liquid in the market, like it’s just kind of so hard because the system of…so like smart contracts are too incomplete and the way that the law works is that they try to cover every etch case with like regulation. The issues that you cannot cover a Turing incomplete set of options with regulation because that’s like infinite. Like every line of code may be like two or three different things so like it seems impossible to make this system work.
That’s my sort of like idea that I have built over the course of the past years. I think you can implement something like these legal wrappers, so like you open a Wyoming LLC and the you have like shares on your Aragon corporation and then the finances but if you want to install a new app on Aragon that is totally different. For example, this fundraising app or use like a bonding curve for one of these more … technologies, how do you translate that to a legal system is like totally I think out of the reach of the legal system. So, I think if you want to exploit like a hundred percent of the potential of these centralized organizations we have to forget about the old and we just have to build the new.
Laura Shin:
Well, so then if someone is creating a DAO on Aragon and the different people that are using it are in different jurisdictions then does that create problems for one or the other of them?
Luis Cuende:
That is a great question. Well, I think the way you can look at it and we’ve been looking at some of the jurisdictions, some of them may treat the DAO as a unit of partnership, some maybe don’t and the issue there…I mean one of the issues with like how they got it to work is that it’s not built for the internet. It’s not built for a world where you can join a DAO and just be part of it, right. So, and there are a lot of interesting questions that arise.
So, for example if you’re a pacifistic holder of the DAO, let’s say you’re a holder of MakerDAO and MakerDAO does something that is illegal in one jurisdiction which I mean it’s not that hard. There is jurisdictions in which like many things are illegal. For example, think about jurisdictions like Thailand or even in Spain where like you just cannot insult the monarchy, right. So, in imagine that there is the Aragon Network DAO which has the ability to do proclamations. So, like to say as a DAO I proclaim something on behalf of my members and this DAO is sold to the monarchy in one of these places. Are you liable now for that? It’s a very hard question and I mean I don’t have the answer. I just think we should be brave and try to experiment with it.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. Actually, on a related note and this might seem unrelated but I think it is similar. I literally just yesterday read this article where there was some astronaut who basically did something in space and I guess she was going for a divorce and she accessed the bank account of her wife who she was separating from and the wife was claiming that it was like a criminal act and she was claiming that they had these shared financial accounts to manage the finances for their son, and anyway, so but the article was saying like there are no laws around like if she’s in space at the time then how do you manage that.
So, I agree that with blockchains also there is like this whole new territory that opens up and it’s not clear how these things will be managed. But actually, again another perfect segue because I was going to ask you about disputes as well and you have this whole dispute system managed by the Aragon court. So, what is that and when do people use that function and how does it work?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. For sure. So, I think one of the most exciting parts of a decentralized organization is that you may be able to use completely create new jurisdictions on the internet but the problem with a smart contract is that they are very limited. So, like you can encode a very small part of the world because of the meatspace, because there are like human subtleties, so you may be able to describe a lot of things with like computer code but you cannot for example say Ethereum should know about my tablet or my computer and when I leave the company it should know that I need to return that to my employer, and so, the idea with Aragon court is that you can also add these human written language or human written code or basically like a contract to a smart contract.
So, in the way you have the best of both worlds and the problem there when we thought about it was like this is amazing for this particular solution, it’s amazing for basically creating or adding a lot of capabilities to the decentralized organizations they didn’t have before but the issue is that courts are hard to run and I mean it’s not that easy to create literally like a court. You have to create the system around it, right. So, when we thought about it, we saw that courts are traditionally very expensive. They are very slow. Like we have cases or have some cases where there are claims against like huge corporations and again it’s very clear but these corporations have so much money that they are able to extend it for years or decades and then settle and that’s it, right.
And so, I believe if we can incentivize fairness by creating a global jurisdiction which basically has a court, that in the court there’s a core component. This is the one that makes sure that you incentivize fairness or you incentivize like people to follow the system of law, we can empower DAOs much more. And so, the idea here is with the court is basically you can create a dispute, you can access this pool of jurors that are incentivized to actually behave because of economic incentives and then the cool thing is that over time you’re going to build jurisprudence that is global. It’s not like linked to any local jurisdiction. So, you may be able to study this one system of law and then basically use it anywhere in the world in a global way.
Laura Shin:
And who are the jurors? Like how are they chosen? Are they just people who hold the Aragon Network token?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, jurors need to stake ANT in order to become participants of this network and so jurors like anyone can be a jurors basically which I think is very cool and then they are chosen randomly. So, for example in the first round when you open a dispute you may be assigned five jurors randomly and then if you don’t agree with the result you can basically raise it to like the next level, and then maybe like 21 and then more until you raise the dispute to like the whole network and all the jurors can participate, and so that makes it very hard for anyone to try to gain the system because in the end jurors are going to make it very expensive. The jury is going to basically make it so expensive that they would have to buy the entire network or like 51 percent of the whole like Aragon Network for them to like win a case.
Laura Shin:
And I mean you keep talking about the normal legal system is expensive. So, how do you guys pay for your court?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, there’s like a flat subscription fee that organizations pay and then there’s like a dispute fee.
Laura Shin:
Wait, and do they pay the fee only when they have a dispute going or like forever?
Luis Cuende:
Well, we’re thinking about it still. I think that it’s like a very small kind of flat fee, like yearly flat fee kind of thing and then just like for a dispute kind of thing it makes sense to have it for a dispute. So, you only pay when you really use it, right, but on the other hand you also need to like give the jurors being paid in some way like the systems that you want it to used for is you want to have them there so if needed you can use them but hopefully you incentivize everyone to not use them, right. So, you need to like pay jurors for doing nothing because they are just there so you don’t need to use them. I mean you need to use them at some point in time but ideally you don’t. It’s just like everyone sees that they’re going to lose money by opening a dispute and so no one does. That’s like the incentive structure.
Laura Shin:
That makes sense. All right so in a moment we’re going to discuss more about governance in the Aragon Network but first a quick word from the sponsors who make this show possible.
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Laura Shin:
Back to my conversation with Luis of Aragon. So, the court system also has appeals. How do appeals work?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Appeals is a system where you don’t agree with the result of the litigation and you basically raise to like the next round and so you just basically grow with the amount of jurors that are involved on network.
Laura Shin:
But I think one side appeals and then you have to put up a stake for that or something and then the other side doesn’t and then the side that puts up the money automatically wins, right.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. You have to like basically stake more and more over time. The cool thing about this though is that because I mean I’m very worried about this world where like people who don’t have resources cannot appeal and so they basically lose the case, right. The whole thing about like programmatically like correcting these cases is that you can fundraise for them and so let’s say there’s a very clear case like David versus Goliath kind of case. So, what David can do to win the case against Goliath is like he can say, all right. I’m going to create this DAO and this is going to fundraise for all the proceeds for my case and then I’m going to basically split the profits with all the participants that invest in this fundraiser, and so the evidence is public. Anyone can just see it and then if people believe in it, they are like not only incentivized to make it fair but also incentivized from an economic point of view to invest in this case. So, David ends up winning the case and then they split proceeds.
Laura Shin:
Very interesting. So, let’s also now talk about the token because Aragon actually was first built without a token. So, let’s talk about what the ANT token does within the system and how you justify its existence if the Aragon Network actually existed before without the token.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Well, so the history was like the following. Basically, we created Aragon and then at some point we were thinking all right, if decentralized organizations are mainstream, what comes next, like what are the services that we’ll need, and so we identified this very important service that was a court and I think that’s actually very like very useful for DAOs for one simple reason and it’s 51 percent attacks. Like we’re seeing that we opened DAOs there is this very easy attack that is basically you can say I want to purpose to withdraw all the money from this DAO to this new DAO that is made out of 51 percent of the participants of this original DAO and then all these participants are incentivized to vote yes to take the money out and the other like 49 percent that maybe like pacifistic holders they risk like getting screwed over and they cannot do anything at all.
And so, if you have the system of dispute resolution you can say, all right. These sort of things are not allowed in this DAO and so one of them is 51 percent attacks, and so when someone opens a vote anyone can dispute it and can basically stop that from happening, and so I think that’s the very first service that will make DAOs mainstream or help make them mainstream because otherwise 51 percent attacks could like stop this trend for open DAOs, but there are also other things like they use it for DAOs in the long term. So, we are thinking about building our own layer on protocol. We’re on like blockchain as well, very optimized for the use case of DAOs, and so the idea or how we are thinking about it is ANT is useful for two things.
One of them it’s pure governance over the project. So, ANT holders right now have basically all the governance over the project. They can choose what the development teams. The can choose proclamations. They can claim for example there is like the Fight for Freedom Day February 10th, which is the day that the Iowa network DAO proclaimed as sort of like yearly vacation for the network. They can do all these things and also, they will be able to basically exchange ANT in this bonding curve for other tokens that are like the jurors token, maybe the like Aragon Chain token, all these things, right, but ANT is like a pure governance token basically.
Laura Shin:
And you mentioned that you guys might try to build your own blockchain and you’re currently on Ethereum. Why would you switch? What is not optimal about Ethereum for Aragon?
Luis Cuende:
Well, things with Ethereum are great in terms of composability. The problem with Ethereum right now is of course like in terms of the roadmap I would say it’s not very appealing, the 2.0 roadmap. I think three years from now it’s really a lot of time and so we are worried about the scalability. So, for example in 2017 there was the whole like ICO craziness and so you have one ICO and that one ICO will basically stop the network from being operational and now with Aragon fundraising we are going to see that maybe multiply by like one order of magnitude more because you can open a fundraiser with like two clicks of this fundraise money and it’s on chain because it’s a bonding curve so like basically all transactions happen on chain so they are even more expensive than like the ICO craze back in 2017.
So, if that happens, we could have a serious scalability issues and the problem there is that like there are two ways to do it. One of them is to optimize a whole other network or the other one is to use optimized another network that you tailor for that specific use case, and so for example you may make cheap or like basically free to run operations that are important for DAOs. So, like one of them that’s very important for us is permission check in. So, like that is hold or have permission to like withdraw finances from the DAO and if they don’t what is the best route that they could do it. Maybe they have tokens, maybe they can open up voting so they can withdraw money from the DAO, all these primitives that we have in our smart contract framework called Aragon OS. They could have way cheaper prices if we had our own chain.
Then the problem there is composability. So, like ideally you have all these protocols in Ethereum and then you are able to access them from these other chains. So, like a DAO can still open a CDP, a DAO can still own DAI, but that’s kind of the rationale that you can build these chains that are very optimized for certain things and then they connect back to Ethereum for like having network effects or composability.
Laura Shin:
Or security even maybe.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Ethereum is like the most secured like smart contract network and there is I think no doubt it’s going to have like the maximum security compared to other like application specific chains.
Laura Shin:
Just to go back earlier in that description you were saying token bonding curve. Can you describe what that is for people.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, if anyone is familiar with like stuff like uni-shop, like it’s a very similar concept. This is a way in which you can exchange two tokens in a fully decentralized way and the thing about the bonding curve is that you can basically define like the demand and supply side so you can sort of like architect the price it’s going to take. So, if there’s more demand they might go up more and you can also basically have reserves attached to this bonding curve.
So, let’s say for example in Aragon fundraising like when you buy tokens into a curve what you are doing is you’re for example sending DAI or ether or something into this curve and this curve is minting new tokens for you in this DAO that is fundraising, and so what happens in the other way around is you sell these tokens and then you get part of these reserves out in ether or DAI or whatever the reserve ratio is defined in, and so that’s how bonding curve works and it’s very exciting because you can basically in the case of Aragon fundraising get rid of centralized exchanges. You don’t need to be listed in Binance or Coinbits or anything like that. You can just have this bonding curve and then in a decentralized way anyone can exchange it.
Laura Shin:
Wow. Yeah. It’s really cool. It’s like having a market that’s just determined by the software.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
So, then the other thing I wanted to ask about was you kept saying that basically you can build the blockchain so that certain functions are cheaper but why can’t you do that via the smart contract? Do you know what I’m saying?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Well, the smart contract, so like its very…in Ethereum for example like everything is very generic and then you have some functionalities that they are built to be faster, so the way to do that is via up-codes or precompiles which basically means that the client understands certain code and instead of like running a native virtual machine, he just runs it in a much more efficient way directly, almost like native way, right, instead of this virtual machine, and the whole thesis around likePolkladot Cosmos protocols is that you may be able to architect your whole chain using these things so everything is faster and cheaper instead of running like super generic virtual machines.
Of course, I think the concept of virtual machine is amazing because with Ethereum you can code anything. Like you are not constrained to what the precompiles or what the up-codes say. You can build anything. That’s the difference with bitcoin right and what made that attractive but on the other hand I think having the power for the whole Aragon community to also basically govern what goes into a precompile, what goes into an up-code, what is optimized, what is it even not optimized. Maybe there are things that we don’t want to optimize for that we want to make them slower and so we incentivize less usage of that. So I think that’s a very cool concept like reclaiming sovereignty for later on basically.
Laura Shin:
Oh, so that’s why there have been all these votes around whether or not to either invest in Polkadot or build on Polkadot. It’s because if you do that, if you build on Polkadot then you can have a parachain that is…oh, now I see. Where it’s like kind of customized for the needs of Aragon.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly. And then and then DAOs can choose. Maybe if you are building on DAO that is all about interacting with like compound and DAI and all these protocols, maybe there is a case for Ethereum and you want to have super high security. It’s going to be super expensive to interact with that DAO for sure but if you want to do that there’s still a huge use case for that but we also want to enable other use cases like organizing with my friends. Maybe I want to create a DAO with like 10 people or I want to run a fundraising and I want people to be able to put money in without having to pay a dollar per transaction, then you want to enable that other use case as well.
Laura Shin:
Okay. I actually want to go back to ask about the jury or the court because I was noticing so basically when you were describing how the jurors come to their decision you guys conceded that okay, jurors might discuss the vote with each other offline but then you also said that the juror fees are ‘distributed proportionally among the jurors that voted for the final ruling option,’ meaning like they basically get paid only if they voted for the one that won, but I feel like doesn’t that give the jurors a financial incentive to collude and then also like because they have to stake the ANT, it seems like they would be incentivized to always vote in favor of what is the best for the value of their own token but I didn’t know if that could sometimes skew the outcomes in a weird way and if you found that desirable or if you even have realized that, that might happen.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Well, first on collusion the idea is that if that happens you can still kind of raise that to the next level and then the next set of jurors…
Laura Shin:
With the appeal you mean.
Luis Cuende:
Yes. Do it on appeal and then next set of jurors may not collude again so like they may go back to like the original sort of outcome that the case will have had in the first place, and then for ANT and actually like sort of the incentive there, that’s an interesting question and there is some research. This is not going to be in our version one. It’s too complex but there has been research on basically if the whole network gets corrupted on doing what is called like Futarchy fork. So basically, what will happen there is that if the whole network is…
Laura Shin:
Actually, just describe for people what Futarchy is.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Futarchy is this very cool almost governance mechanism but not really in which you basically have like two different prediction markets and so basically you predict what is going to be the winning option over a certain metric. So, for example let’s say you are running a country and so this country you define that this excess metric is the GDP of the country and then you have like two different presidents and so you may vote or you may bet on the president that is going to increase the GDP more and then if one president wins and increases the GDP you get rewarded for betting on that and then if on the contrary the GDP goes down then you get slashed or you may just not get rewarded for the outcome.
And so, there is this final process that is very much in research right now which is that if the whole network gets corrupted. So like ANT holders all get corrupted and there’s like a 51 percent attack on the whole network which will be very expensive but could happen and then you could basically split the network in two and then run that Futarchy market on which ANT enterprise in the future and so if the network is incentivized to keep running and to keep the courts running you could predict that the enterprise will go up if the court case is actually resolved in a rational way, right, instead of like being corrupt. And so, you could basically choose a fork in which the ANT is valued more because that’s the one in which people are betting that the outcome was right and which the other one…is a good very sort of sci-fi structure but it’s very interesting and Luke Duncan from our team proposed it a few months ago and I think it makes a lot of sense.
Laura Shin:
And wait, just so I understand. It’s sort of like it would be like if back when Ethereum Classic split from Ethereum if there were like markets placed on which one.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
But then what would happen? So, whichever one has the high GDP or whatever then what, you kill off the other chain? Like that’s not possible, right.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. I mean basically what will happen is like people just kind of migrate from one to the other and that’s it, and you have like two different tokens and there’s one token accrues value, people bet on it and you are one who’s value may end up being worthless.
Laura Shin:
Okay. I don’t know with ideology some people might be convinced that they were right anyway. But anyway, okay. So, we’ve been talking a lot about governance of like the DAOs within Aragon but let’s talk about the governance of Aragon itself because you have a way of governing Aragon which is called AGP which is sort of similar to like an Ethereum improvement proposal or a bitcoin improvement proposal. So, describe the AGP system.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So AGPs are Aragon governance proposals and they are the ways that you can change Aragon or govern Aragon and so there is AGP-0 which is the Aragon Manifesto. It’s like a very broad mission statement about the project which lists the values that the project has and then there is AGP-1, which is the governance process 42:26 itself, like how you can submit AGPs and get them passed and approved. And there is just like AGPs that people are proposing and so this AGPs may take different shapes.
So, one of them is like a finance track AGP which basically is around finance management and funding different teams and funding initiatives. There is a meta track which changes the project itself, like governance project itself, and there’s a proclamations track. For example, this like Fight for Freedom Day that I was talking about that was put in by the network. It was a proclamation. It was the network proclaiming I want to have a national holiday so to say. And so, the good thing about these AGPs is that they get voted by the whole network and then ANT holders are free to vote and then whatever happens is executed.
So, right now there is a point in centralization though that I have to talk about which is there is this legal entity in Switzerland called the Aragon Association and that one right now curates proposals and uses this mechanism, this voting mechanism as signaling for what to do but like in the end the Aragon Association is the one that is executing these things and it’s curating them as well, and so that’s a point of centralization and the reason why we cannot get away with it right now is because the Aragon Association has to curate these proposals so they are not outright illegal, right, because right now the Aragon Association is the one that like has the funds for taking care of the project and so he has the power over this finances and if the Aragon Association just basically send money somewhere that was maybe illegal then I would have been held liable.
We want to change it and fully decentralize the project is actually using the Aragon court. So, one of the first use cases that we’re going to have for the court is actually ourselves. We are going to transition the money, the finances, the funds for the project into a DAO and then instead of curating that we at the Aragon Association we’re just going to have this sort of like manifesto and then people will be able to propose AGPs and the network, like different holders may actually approve or reject them for the ballot. So, if the AGPs don’t agree or don’t really empower or don’t really follow the Aragon manifesto, then you can open a dispute and basically, they don’t go to vote. So that’s how we plan to decentralize the process entirely.
Laura Shin:
Okay. There’s so much to unpack there but basically so the Aragon Association is sort of like the Ethereum Foundation in Switzerland.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
Where essentially it has control of the funds from the crowd sale but then there are like literal people that have signed on as directors where in Switzerland if you guys do anything out of line with the mission of the association then you can be held personally liable. So, now you want to decentralize that into did you say it was a smart contract or a DAO?
Luis Cuende:
It’s a DAO. Yeah
Laura Shin:
But like so what I didn’t get was this part where people vote and then you disperse the funds based on how they vote. So, how does that happen because to my mind it would seem like you would need a multi-sig but then there’s like people in control of that multi-sig.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Well, we want to decentralize the funds as well. So, like the DAO would be one having the funds.
Laura Shin:
Right. But then for the DAO to make a transaction, who initiates that?
Luis Cuende:
There were things like the governors of this DAO would be ANT holders. So, ANT holders initiate the vote and then if the support threshold is passed and the vote passes then it automatically gets executed and the money goes out.
Laura Shin:
Like the smart contract does it.
Luis Cuende:
Exactly.
Laura Shin:
It’s just coded.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, people vote. Like let’s give Laura 100 percent of the tokens and that passes then like what?
Luis Cuende:
Then it happens.
Laura Shin:
So, the smart contract sees, okay, it’s passed. Okay. So, I get it. So, then whoever makes the proposal, they’re proposing a piece of code where it’s like if such and such then move the money to Laura’s address. Something like that.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. It’s pretty much like that. Yeah. Like when you open a DAO in this place and you create like a finance proposal for example, what you are saying is my intent is to get money from this place to this other place and I want to get maybe a hundred ANT, like token in this amount and then when it’s passed then automatically the smart contract basically executes that intent.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, this has happened multiple times now in the conversation but it’s very good because you keep like answering the question almost before I get there because my next question was to ask about your ideal governance which you remember I asked you about in the beginning, and I was wondering how Aragon currently falls short. So that seems like one way but are there any other ways where you feel like Aragon needs to make other changes to get closer to your ideal.
Luis Cuende:
One interesting conversation we’re having in the Aragon community right now is around lock voting and the awards for voting. So, there was this very interesting AGP that happened I think in the last vote or in the previous one which was about Aragon buying Dots, Polkadot…
Laura Shin:
Which was just because you guys wanted to invest like 1.5 million dollars into Dots, right, something like that.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. It was something like that. Yeah. Exactly. And so that was a very interesting proposal because basically it didn’t pass at the end but then there was a proposal call AGP 42 which was about not building Aragon on Polkadot so that it was Ameen from like Spankchain and Moloch proposed that one and that one…
Laura Shin:
He was on Unchained in case people missed that episode. You should listen to it. It was very good. Anyway, keep going.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, there was AGP 42 which was about like Aragon not building on Polkadot and Ameen posted this tweet like who can lend me one million ANT so I can like sway the vote. I can vote on my proposal and I can get it passed, right, and the issue with tokens right now is that they are tradeable so I mean it’s not easy, right. This is like a functionality they have but you can buy them and if they are just for governance you may be able to sway the rest of the vote, and so there is this idea of lock voting which is you lock your tokens for maybe a year and you get a reward for voting. So, you get more voting power. If you lock them for four years you get even more. If you lock them for a hundred years you get even more and so the idea there is that you want to have people in your community that are really incentivized for the long term of the project, so the more they lock their tokens the more incentivized they are for the long term outcomes and other short term ones.
So, you prevent communities or having communities which are made of like pump and dumpers basically which happens a lot in the crypto space, and so that’s one interesting conversation when it’s around reward and votes, so rewarding people who vote, maybe via inflation but then you have the problem of random voting. So, you don’t want to ask people to just go their and they random vote whatever they want to vote. You need to make sure that they read and they understand it. So, it may be a combination of rewards plus locked voting would be an ideal way to actually incentivize people to stay and make decisions in the long term.
Laura Shin:
And then just so I understand, so for the locked votes, like the longer you lock them then they more weight your vote has.
Luis Cuende:
Oh, yeah.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, it’s similar to the lockdrop that Edgeware was doing where you get more tokens the longer you lock them up. Well, one other thing that I wanted to ask about was so voter participation has so far been low. So, that vote in the spring on whether or not to buy Dots at all, less than five percent of all tokens were used in that vote, so how do you plan to get higher levels of participation?
Luis Cuende:
Well, I think there are multiple ways to achieve that. One of them is user experience. I think right now it just takes money to vote. It’s a very long process and also if there are 10 proposals in the ballot, some of them are very complex and you need to like study them so it takes a lot of time and it takes like a full day for an Aragon community member to study them and vote accordingly. So, that could be enhanced way more. I think also delegated voting will help. So, we’re planning to implement that so you can delegate your votes to someone else and then they can vote.
But I think in the future it would be less of a direct democracy and more as like representative. I think that’s where the world has been going for the last hundreds of years, right. We have like these representatives of democracies, and so I think that’s great but this new system also allows you to vote directly if you don’t want to go through like intermediaries, right. So, I think that’s great and also with this liquid democracy you are able to basically delegate and then if the representative is doing something wrong you can automatically delegate to another one. You don’t have to wait for four years, four-year terms, and so, I think that’s super interesting to increase participation turn out.
On the other hand, I have to say I think we’re very obsessed with participation and we shouldn’t focus on that so much. We should focus on the outcome of the decisions and so if you look at the Aragon Network and the outcomes of their decisions, so far, it’s been like amazing. I’m really amazed by there hasn’t been any major like decision that has impacted the project in a negative way, and so I think the important participation outcome and the participation rate necessarily.
Laura Shin:
Well, one thing also is that at this moment there’s not a lot of usage of the network. Like there are fewer than 700 organizations in Aragon so far and then there’s even less than one million dollars in Aragon smart contracts. So, what are your plans to get more adoption?
Luis Cuende:
That’s a great question. I think that’s one of the main problems of the space. We are building technology that is very idealistic but this is how to get like actual like mainstream users. I think fundraising would really help. The use case that I love Aragon fundraising is actually I think the best way to fundraise from anywhere in the world and then do it in a comfortable and transparent way. So, I think that would really help a lot of adoption in the short term. We’re also launching a new version that is going to make it way easier for people to use Aragon, in terms of user experience. So, I think that will really help as well.
I think there is one missing piece which is onboarding, crypto onboarding and private keys and all these things, and I’m very excited to see that more and more projects interested in it because ideally you don’t need to remember private keys, you don’t need to install MetaMask. You just use it like a Web 2 app almost. And so, I think that will really help adoption as well. Focusing on niche cases and handholding users, this is something that I’m very excited about and we started doing more and more because there is where you see the struggles that people are having and so I think that will really help in the medium term.
I think in the short terms it’s actually very tough to get mainstream adoption. I think even what we are seeing is that people are using Aragon in the crypto scene more than mainstream right now because the crypto people actually understand way better why they need it. So, we have this example of like Melon Protocol which launched their tokens a time ago and they built a protocol.
Laura Shin:
Wait, Melon.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Melon.
Laura Shin:
Oh, Mona was on my show, too.
Luis Cuende:
Nice. Yeah. They are great. And so, I think as of like a few days ago actually they transitioned their whole governance to an Aragon DAO
Laura Shin:
Oh, wow.
Luis Cuende:
So, they have these DAO token holders and these token holders vote on council and this council can operate the smart contracts. So, that’s an option right there but I think we’re going to see mainstream adoption more in the medium long term and not so much in the short term. I think in the short term crypto options are going to be the most powerful.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. When I was researching this, I was like this is getting really futuristic and I was like this isn’t like something that people are really using a lot now but it’s really interesting and I did another episode with like Glen Weyl and Santiago Siri and some of the ideas were similar. So, you kind of mentioned something about this but I wanted to ask you directly. So, this is actually something I’m not certain about but I did read somewhere that you personally have a large percentage of ANT. I could not verify that. I tried to figure that out but I couldn’t so you can correct me if I’m wrong but regardless, like do you think in general the concept of whales adversely affects governance and if so, how would you guys try to address that?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Well, I think there is a lot of hate against plutocracy and I think on one hand that’s understandable but on the other hand hiring people who have like some skin in the game is actually very good. Like I think if you are a business fund for example, and you put up a significant amount of your portfolio to just buy a token because you really believe in the future of it, then I mean capital at the end of the day is like how you stake in the systems, if you will. So, like if you build up which is in overtime, you of course deserve like to govern it in some way. I think the confusion comes in where when we talk about common goods versus not common goods, and so I think actually I had an interesting discussion yesterday about this where someone was arguing that Bitcoin and Ethereum were not protocols because protocols are used as standards and standards are free. So, with Bitcoin Ethereum you need to like buy to be part of it.
So, I think actually what we are seeing is that what we call protocols are not protocols. They are networks and they are, as I see them, they are like a next generation shareholder governance. So, in traditional corporate you have shareholders and they govern the whole system. Usually they are very institutionalized and we have companies like Apple, Google, which have a lot of like early investors back in the day which basically kind of had all the growth, all the upset from those networks and now with Bitcoin and Ethereum we’re seeing a more and more retail investors are getting in and they are also profiting from these huge networks that have been built in the beginning and that’s a benefit. Like they are much more open. They are much more fluid. You don’t need to be a great investor. You don’t need to be a VC to access the project.
Like if you look at Bitcoin for example, it wasn’t VC firms that got Bitcoin at one dollar. It was cyberbanks, people who were buying drugs. It was like complete different crowd and I think that’s like the way to look at it. There’s like an extended version of shareholder governance, like a next generation shareholder governance and not so much common goods. Although it also has a little bit of common goods but I wouldn’t look at it that way as of right now at least.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. The one comment I have about that is I think there were some wealthy people who got in at a dollar but I won’t name them on the podcast, but anyway. So, I actually wanted to just ask more directly about that issue with the Polkadot vote. You kind of addressed it with the locked voting but I didn’t know if there was like anything else you would add, but basically, so just for people who don’t know, and I can’t remember if we described on the show, but basically there was this vote, you know, should we stay focused on Ethereum or should we also develop on Polkadot, and as the vote was going along it seems like the sentiment was to stay developing on Ethereum and then at the very last minute somebody put in a ton of tokens to sway the vote in the other direction where like it would be really impossible in a short amount of time to overcome the tokens they put in. So, would the locked voting solve that or are there any other solutions you guys are thinking of?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. To be more specific like the vote, the outcome of the vote was like no but I think it was like one percent more no than yes and then this whale made it like way more kind of no than yes in the end but it was already no. I think with locked voting you may be able to solve it but I don’t think it’s an issue. Like in this particular case I was trying to identify who this person was and I couldn’t and that’s the beauty of it but I was trying to identify like just going through and scanning, seeing what tokens they held and all of that, and it was like an OG, like an Aragon OG. So, like this person was in the community for a long time and so I think with locked voting you actually like maybe even this person has more power but they were an OG. I don’t know if they bought in the market. I can’t remember but the thing, you know, if they have bought their share of their cake, I think it’s legitimate that they vote.
Laura Shin:
Okay. So, you don’t have any other ways to kind of prevent the gaming of the system in this way or do you not see it as gaming?
Luis Cuende:
Well, there is one way. I don’t see it as gaming to be honest but there is one way that you can prevent this kind of last minute votes. Like I think this is last minute votes, right, in the last minute someone basically changed the outcome and so you can have this mechanism for voting. There’s actually also been kind of discussed in the community which is that if there’s a significant change in the answer in the last like minutes or hours or if there’s a significant amount of votes you can extend the period of time of the vote for like 24 hours or 48, or something like that, and then do it again and again until like basically there are no like final last minute votes and then at that point it’s like the final outcome is revealed.
So, I think stuff like that may help. Also, like kind of lock and reveal voting where votes are not transparent by default but you have to commit it first and then reveal it at the end and then like all votes are public but use it at the end and not like real time, I think that would help.
Laura Shin:
And obviously you and I were here this week in Berlin for Web3 and DOTCon. So, did you guys present anything or like what milestones will people be looking at going forward?
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. So, my co-founder Jorge presented the Aragon Network and it was so cool because the room was so packed. It was really amazing to see like the interest on a court system which like two years ago was sci-fi and no one really believed it could be like done. Then I had the open keynote at the Web3 Summit and the Web3 Summit this year was very much about DAOs. Like it was kind of crazy. It was me and then Ryan Zurrer representing some ideas around very interesting DAOs that are coming up. Then there was a DAO panel. Then it was Yalda from one of the Aragon development teams called All Dark presenting their Aragon apps and their fit for like Aragon organization.
So, it was pretty much about DAOs and I’m super excited because like I think we saw this trend coming but we didn’t see the interest so much in the community this past two years or so. I think the stigma on the DAO was still being carried around and I think now we are like liberating ourselves from that and we are ready to like, like the DAO 2.0 kind of thing, right. So, I’m super excited about it. And then we also represented the Aragon design system which is our take on enhancing consistency across all the Aragon platform and making sure that Aragon app developers can easily design new apps by like basically dragging and dropping components.
Laura Shin:
Yeah. So, a couple of things. So, I wanted to do this show partially because I know everybody is talking about DAOs again. So, I was like okay, this is like a good way to kind of be on trend but then the other thing was that actually it’s funny that we mentioned the space thing before because Yalda’s idea is about governance in space. Like she wants to, what was it? It’s like something like it’s a decentralized organization to explore space or something.
Luis Cuende:
Yes. It’s like a decentralized space x basically.
Laura Shin:
Okay. Yeah. So, that’s funny that, that was a theme in this episode. Well anyway, thanks so much for coming on Unchained.
Luis Cuende:
Yeah. Thanks, Laura. Thanks a lot.
Laura Shin:
Thanks, so much for joining us today. To learn more about Luis and Aragon, check out the show notes inside your podcast player. If you’re not yet subscribed to my other podcast, Unconfirmed, which is shorter and a bit newsier, be sure to check that out. Also, find out what I think are the top crypto stories each week by signing up for my email newsletter at unchainedpodcast.com. Unchained is produced by me, Laura Shin, with help from Fractal Recording, Anthony Yoon, Daniel Nuss and Rich Stroffolino. Thanks for listening.
