The calm before the storm

Last week was loaded with great experiences around the events of AraCon1-the flagship event of the community of the Aragon project. I had the privilege to attend and help to make this event unforgettable, it was a blast!

Most of the events and talks were concentrated on on-chain governance and DAOs — Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. Aragon gathered together the core contributors and minds of this specific niche inside the Blockchain movement to create a unique experience for the DAO enthusiasts. The event prompted special feelings to many people, and some have compared it to the feeling of the early days of the Ethereum community.

I’d wanted to share some my highlights of that week with those who didn’t attend, to make sure they’ll come to AraCon2 😉

Kicking the week with the first couple of beers at Full-Node 🍻

For me, that fantastic week started with a satellite event hosted by the Cambrial Capital guys, called ‘Investing in Governance’. The event was close to the public and an invite request was necessary(thanks to Ste and Alex for the invite) to get the event’s location address.

The speaker's squad level was high, and the meetup kicked off with Elad Verbin(Berlin Innovation Ventures) presenting on CollabTech(as they say), and interestingly explained on some of the concepts that uniquely create this synonym, and why it’s one of the most valuable tech models that shape Web3.

After Elad, there was a cool investors panel with Jake from CoinFund, W3F’s Ryan, Alex from Placeholder, Aragon/Semantic’s Ste and Alex from Index Ventures. The panel was greatly moderated by David from Cambrial. It was a great jam on governance investing, DAOs and what’s about to come next. It was interesting to see how each one of them look at on-chain governance from an investing perspective. Some disagreements and different points of view added some spice to the discussion, and good audience questions were asked.

To those who’re interested in catching up on this — the event’s recording will probably be online soon at the Cambrial youtube channel.

The morning after — AraCon has officially begun

Aragon’s Luke Duncan presenting on stage

Stepping up the UX game

As we all know, one of the most talkative subject in the space today is usability and user experience, and a lot of people relates this pain point to the mass adoption barrier. One of the most important things I see in building DAO platforms and centers to bring together decentralized decision making, is to build a product that is able to be used conveniently by organizations, large or small, and have a decent UX design that enables non-technical users to enjoy on-chain governance without being intimidated by long addresses and complicated actions.

Seems like Aragon has focused a lot of their efforts over the past months to step up their UX game. They have announced both Mobile(will be the first release of Bella 0.7) and Desktop versions to allow users a smoother experience and flexibility, that will help improving participation in vote proposals and other network engagements. On top of that, we’re seeing major design improvements like live notifications and easier user interface. Besides the convenience, seems like the main benefit of the Desktop version would be 🚀 loading times and faster platform reactions. All of that with an IPFS node that lives directly on your desktop, that’s pretty awesome. In addition, all transactions will be supported by Frame(an Aragon Nest project).

I already downloaded the desktop version and it’s pretty cool, you can download it too here.

Another few words about a UX-first project- ‘Guesser’. It was launched by two cool amigos during the event, and it’s a kick-ass prediction markets platform that is built on top of Augur. I got to see it right before it launched and really liked the UX from the first interaction 😍. Certainly not a common thing with blockchain apps. Kudos to them 💪

Aragon x Polkadot?

One of the most exciting projects to some people(including me) is Polkadot and is considered to be the scalable blockchain we’re all waiting for(Where’s Eth 2.0?), with mainnet planned to get shipped in late 2019.

Some cool projects have started building applications using Polkadot’s framework Substrate and relay on Polkadot’s chain as Parachains. Aragon has announced they are exploring an opportunity of joining the party to build a secondary network to aragonOS on Polkadot.

Speaking of Polkadot, Ryan Zurrer had an interesting presentation about Web3 and showed us some interesting governance models and concepts deploying on Polkadot. The most interesting part to me was Gavin Wood’s Adaptive Quorum Biasing, a voting mechanism that favors regularly active participants over passive ones to adapt the system to be more sensible.

Ryan presented another interesting project that practices on-chain governance(that will be the first parachain on Polkadot) called Edgeware, an experimental smart contract blockchain that enables on-chain governance experiments to test effectiveness and adoption of the participant's network.

The humbles who build important infrastructure

As much as I enjoyed getting exposed to many new projects during the event, I got particularly excited about two of them, both building impressive infrastructures with Aragon’s support. I have found both the people and projects they stand behind extremely ambitious.

Pando Network, a Nest program grantee(also submitting a proposal for a Flock team) is working on a super interesting project, in goal to achieve a completely decentralized(DAO-based) versioning control system to manage code contributions. The main purpose of their mission is to replace reliance on git/GitHub. This distributed VCS is built on aragonOS, Ethereum and IPFS. I had a blast watching their presentation and also enjoyed chatting with one of the co-founders Daniel. I wish them the best of luck, will personally make sure to participate on their Flock proposal vote.

Autark🌌 wants to build tools that will enable decentralized communication in the moon 🐱‍🚀(yes, in the moon). The founding team consists of two talented entrepreneurs, Yalda and Arthur, both coming from a passionate working background around decentralization( Yalda co-founded the Space-Cooperative and met Arthur while contributing to Giveth). The team is a Nest program grantee and recently got approved on the Aragon AGP vote proposal to become an official Flock team, fully funded by the Aragon Association with 390k DAI to run the project.

To me, Autark’s project is amazing, as it has high end-goal in mind while starting on the ground with a very realistic idea. Their outline is to build friendly communication tools on the Aragon network, to enrich the DAO’s ecosystem with a toolset that will enable seamless communications across various channels. Their end goal is to build Aragon apps that will power a decentralized space agency(!!).

They presented an impressive demo showing some of the stuff they have accomplished so far as part of designing their suite. I had a great time watching it live, and I encourage you to watch it too.

Melonport governance now powered by Aragon

Melonport, an impressive piece of infrastructure, practices a decentralized asset-management protocol that will shut down its team operations very soon. The goal behind that is to become fully decentralized by trying to maximize the network effect while keeping the stakeholders incentivized enough to participate in the network’s governance, as Mona said in her talk.

Part of these efforts includes upgrading the Melon Council, the core group of high-level governance votings effectors. The efforts to have a network that is fully self-governed has to include a scalable framework, and they have chosen aragonOS to support the Melon Council DAO. that will enable actions like inviting new technical councils, vote them in or out, voting on protocol ENS sub-domains and protocol parameters.

That’s an impressive move by the team behind this great project, and I think this truly reflects the movement of decentralization and DAOs 👏

Witnet launches a testnet on a boat party 🎉🚤

At the end of day 2 of AraCon, Witnet hosted a fun boat party and gathered most of the event’s participants to get tipsy all together on a boat by the river behind the BOLLE.

It was big fun to get together on a few Berliner 🍺 and watch Adán launches a new testnet, and sending a first data request on the Witnet decentralized oracle network. The team has been working hard on solving the problem of connecting smart contracts to the outside world through a decentralized oracle network, and successfully managed to complete the data request through on the testnet.

ChainSafe’s Görli testnet launch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

At the end of the first day of AraCon, Parity hosted a wonderful community gathering to learn about building with Substrate and connecting to Polkadot. As a W3F grantee building on Polkadot, Aidan from ChainSafe was one of the speakers there and he presented some of the latest projects they’ve been working on at ChainSafe, teasing towards GörliCon — A one-day event of ChainSafe and the ETHBerlin community to launch the new Görli testnet.

ChainSafe is open-source by definition and very open to contributors, it was well-emphasized throughout the presentation and definitely gave the feeling they are building some cool stuff. Though I wasn’t able to attend, I’ve heard GörliCon was awesome, and a lot of good vibes spread around. The Testnet is now live and you can check it out.

A note to the Aragon folks

AraCon was amazing and ended before I even noticed. Passing through the BOLLE the day after on my way to TXL airport, it was hard realizing how much fun was concentrated into this lovely venue in less than 48 hours.

Big thanks to the great humans at Aragon, who made this event unforgettable! Everything ran super smooth, the food was awesome, and I didn’t meet any people who weren’t awesome 😉

Special thanks to Alexa from A1 and Lucija who ran the show.

Not forgetting the lovely people I met who helped to make this event amazing, the volunteers. It was great meeting you all.

Until next time ✌