Aragon Agent and the future of DAOs

Enabling organizations to interact on the decentralized web

early design mockup for the Agent app

This week Aragon One announced the release of the beta for Aragon Agent, “a fully-fledged Ethereum account owned by an Aragon organization”.

Reading it like that might not make all the bells ring, but for me Aragon Agent is one of the fundamental pieces of the infrastructure needed to transition to a decentralized web and, more importantly, decentralized commerce world.

With Agent, DAOs can now interact with any smart-contract as if they were a normal user. The Agent app will then look inside of the DAO to see if it can perform the action, or if it needs to create a vote from the tokenholders, and will automatically create the vote and execute the action resulting from that vote.

You will be able to use Metamask, Frame or other web3 interfaces and choose a DAO account, in a similar (but infinitely more awesome and flexible way) as using your corporate card on a website.

This means that DAOs are now one step closer to being fungible for people that want to create fully-online businesses.

Permissionless finance

With Agent, you can now pool your money together in a trustless way, and trade on decentralized exchanges, or stake your tokens on Staked, or lend them out on Compound, or provide liquidity on Uniswap.

Before Agent, there was literally no way to do this unless you wanted to rely on an offline legal structure and place 100% of the trust on the person actually making the transaction from their own private wallet.

I’ve always thought that DAOs will be the default choice for people that want to come together to collaborate on online business endeavors. Today, this is possible in the new world of Open Finance.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Permissionless commerce

Probably the biggest game changer will be in B2B.

Imagine a world where you are 100% sure that the organization that issued the invoice via Centrifuge is the one they are pretending to be, because you can see that the transaction has come from their ENS-registered DAO address. And you can pay the invoice from your own DAO by initiating a transaction and then not having to worry about approvals and executions. A vote is immediately created, and once everyone approves, the transaction automatically gets sent.

One of the major implications of all of this, is the fact that we are now encapsulating assets and business relationships in trustless containers. This means that DAO tokens can become part of the wider Open Finance web.

As we’ve seen, today DAOs can hold long crypto positions, loans, and other financial instruments, but in the not so distant future they will hold real estate and other tokenized real assets.

All of this means that we will use DAO tokens as collateral for other Open Finance applications.

So, you will be able to codify complex ownership relationships that result in a trustless ownership of a final asset.

If you’ve watched “The Big Short” you know that on Wall Street you never really own what you think you own. It’s always other people who own it, and they don’t always give it to you when you ask for it back.

And all of this, without having to ask for permission to any government even once.

Welcome to the future 🦅