The progress of development from the fourth quarter of 2018

The fourth quarter of 2018, spanning the months of October to December, was all about shipping, iterating, and then more shipping. The period also coincided with many breakthroughs on our research, from scalable on-chain voting to a crystallization of the first version of the Aragon Network. The results have helped guide the Aragon project’s product roadmap as well as the Flock proposals of Aragon One and the Aragon DAC.

Aragon 0.6 and aragonOS 4

Both the Aragon 0.6 release, named "Alba", and the latest iteration of aragonOS saw the light of day. See previous posts for the Aragon client and aragonOS 4 for in-depth announcements.

The huge spike in completed progress of Aragon 0.6 as DevCon IV neared.

After the release of Aragon 0.6, the team at Aragon One took time to gather all the user feedback and UX issues. Afterward, some unexpected behavior with the Mainnet contracts was discovered. Thus we released three incremental updates to the client: 0.6.0-hotfix, 0.6.1, and 0.6.2.

0.6.0-hotfix

An important hotfix to patch an infinite loop that caused the app to crash during organization on-boarding for some users

0.6.1

Support for AGP-1

A number of animation improvements and bug fixes

0.6.2

Initial support for EIP-1102 (privacy mode for Ethereum providers)

Organization switcher, allowing you to browse and bookmark multiple organizations

Completely redesigned radspec descriptions in the signing panel. This greatly improves the description of a proposed on-chain action

Many clarification improvements and bug fixes. including properly handling the DS-Token (e.g. DAI) edge case of how symbols and names are reported

Luis also put on his developer hat and did a few quick iterations to stabilize a desktop version of Aragon 0.6. Thus a truly decentralized, user-friendly way will become available for the users of Aragon. The work continues towards launching this alongside the web client.

The following packages used by the Aragon client were also updated and published

See aragonOS 4 announcement blog post for details

2.0.0 to 2.0.3

Migration to solidity pragma 0.4.24

0.20.0 to 0.27.0

Major dependency upgrades. 0.27.0 now being the last to support styled-components@3 and react-springs@5

Added Checkbox, IdentityBadge, Popover, TabBar, Timer, TransactionBadge, and ToastHub components

Redesigned RadioButton and RadioGroup components with accessibility in mind

Migration began to Lorikeet UI. Join the Lorikeet chat if you’re interested in helping shape its future!

Released beta versions of the client-side middleware (@aragon/wrapper). Included large performance improvements and bug fixes

Significant in-progress work to upgrade dependencies and release a stabilized version

dao-kits

Migration of the token democracy and multisig kits to aragonOS 4

Creation and deployment of AGP-1 kit

Added functionality that allows organizations to be created in a single transaction

radspec

1.0.0 to 1.1.4

Implemented boolean literals, more equality operators, and helper functions

Developer Experience

The Aragon DAC led the charge this quarter, representing Aragon at ETHSingapore. Thanks to everyone who participated, especially those who decided to build with Aragon and got awarded prizes! We always enjoy meeting people who are new to the ecosystem or the Aragon stack, and hope to see you again at future events as well as online :)

The DAC continued to focus on advancing the developer experience of the ecosystem. Significant efforts were made to improve the documentation and developer tooling with the support of Aragon One.

A complete sweep-through to clarify, improve, and reword many sections

Updated tutorial to make it easier to follow for newcomers

Added aragonOS 4 reference documentation and migration guides

5.1.0 to 5.2.2

Significantly improved the feedback and information from the publishing flow to aragonPM

Added support for calculating transaction paths when installing and upgrading apps if the account used with the CLI doesn’t have direct permissions to do so

Added support for use with the Frame interface

Improved debug logging, to troubleshoot cases where a command fails unexpectedly

Initiated updates to the app boilerplates

Numerous bug fixes and UX improvements

Initiated implementation of the simplified interfaces for app developers

Research

Described a challenge with the cost and scalability of on-chain voting. Proposed EVM Storage proofs as a foundational element of a secure layer 2 voting protocol.

There was discussion around enabling arbitrary actions from Aragon Organizations. This could be achieved by creating a superset of the existing Vault app and pairing it with the signing provider infrastructure.

Continued to work towards a staking solution for Agreements and the Aragon Court.

Did a technical exploration of Identity and Organization Membership. Analyzed how could the capability and usability of Aragon improve with it.

Payroll

On-chain automated payrolls are a step closer to reality after last quarter!

Building off of the work of Aragon One from Q2, Protofire took on the responsibility of updating the contracts and building the front-end. As their name implies, they’ve been on fire in Q4. They completed most of the development required for audits. This is a first step for the app to be used by Flock teams like Aragon One.

There’s no timeline set yet on when the Payroll app will be available to the public. But this is an exciting use case that we want to test as soon as possible before recommending to others.

Other Highlights

Website redesigns

Delfi has done an incredible job since joining Aragon One at the start of the quarter! She's given a facelift to many of the project’s websites and blogs. These include aragon.org, blog.aragon.org, transparency.aragon.org.

Max has also built a new landing page for the Aragon DAC!

Bug bounty launched

A Mainnet bug bounty for the smart contracts supporting Aragon 0.6 is live. Please visit the bug bounty wiki page for more information about what’s in scope and how to report any findings.

aragonPM deployments

As part of the 0.6 launch, Aragon One did a significant overhaul on both the deployment process of applications to aragonPM as well as how uptime is ensured for the web assets on IPFS. Check out the redone deployments repository for more information as well as an audit trail of the deployments.

All Aragon Devs calls

Coordination between Flock teams and developers in the community has been ongoing in bi-weekly all devs calls. Find out more about these calls, as well as how to join, in its wiki page.

Aragon.chat

An emphasis has been placed towards publicizing all development-related chat from Flock teams. The #design, #dev, #dev-evm, #dev-frontend, #dev-help & #feedback channels are where these discussions are taking place. We welcome everyone to join in or take a look!

Contributions

We always appreciate community contributions, so a big thank you to all the community members who contributed during Q4! We could not have done this without you!

aragonUI

Added Popover and TransactionProgress component

aragonUI

Add ToastHub component