Tell us more about your background and interests in the space.

I got started working on open source when I was 12, primarily due to my interest on how a bunch of people could get together without knowing each other, create a piece of software, and give it back to the community for free. For me, that was revolutionary and a beautiful process.

When I was 15 I got into the startup world and I’ve been creating multiple companies, the last one Stampery. I read Satoshi’s whitepaper in 2011 and it blew my mind. I have always been interested in philosophy, politics and governance in general, and that’s why I love the cypherpunk nature of the blockchain.

Can you speak to what Aragon is and what it does for people?

Aragon is a platform for decentralized governance built on Ethereum. You can think of it as the operating system for people. People can create a decentralized organization and make governance decisions collaboratively, and control assets, issue a token, perform a token sale… all bits of functionality are encoded as apps in smart contracts, so they’re fully pluggable with each other, and upgradeable over time.

What qualities do you look for in projects that you advise and support?

I’m very picky about it, because I’m conscious that there’s a huge reputation risk attached to advising any project. I seek 100% crypto based projects — so I don’t look for projects that empower or bridge with the traditional world, but rather projects that embrace the cypherpunk philosophy and make its vision a reality. I also make sure I get along with the founder(s) — with all the crypto momentum going on, it’s too easy to just turn greedy, so I need to make sure I find people whose life’s goal is not accumulating money. I look for great listeners — I want to be heard, because if not, it doesn’t make any sense for me to give advice! That’s also hard to find, since a lot of newcomers are going into the space thinking they have everything figured out.

Finally, I look for projects that are fundamental for my vision of the new world we’re building, so I can be closer to them and help as I can.

What attracted you to the Keep project in particular?

I remember Matt Luongo sent me an email July 31st to chat about a new project he was thinking about. During the call, he pitched me Keep, and asked if I’d be interested on it. One of the use cases we have on the roadmap for Aragon is having shared encrypted data vaults for DAOs — and I’d totally see Keep being a key part of it, so I was very excited to hear about it!

Then Matt sent me the whitepaper, and as I was getting more and more swamped by work, I took a while to read it. But when I read it, I was blown away by the level of detail that I saw.

Finally, I met Matt in devcon and that was when I knew I wanted to advise. It rarely happens that you find a top-notch technical team led by a top-notch technical founder that also happens to be nice and assertive.

Tell us about the community you’ve built at Aragon and why it’s important.

In this new era of open source, community-governed projects, the community is everything. In Aragon’s case, the community provided early feedback for the product, funds, and contributions to the software. In the past, due to limitations in the organizational frameworks, you could only have a few people in your organization. Today, thanks to online communication tools, open source software and tokens, you can leverage an organization of thousands of people that are all contributing to the same vision and mission. Another very important aspect is governance: how can we leverage all that collective intelligence so we take better decisions? And that’s what we’re researching now

How will your community potentially benefit from the Keep?

I think in Aragon’s case it’s clear: we have a lot of interest in exploring how to build an encrypted data vault for DAOs. I think it’s a killer app, and very much needed for Aragon to be deployed in a lot of mainstream use cases, where there are things that cannot or shouldn’t be public.

What’s coming up next for Aragon?

Mainnet deployment! We are getting Aragon Core, the core Aragon dapp for running decentralized organizations, ready for mainnet deployment in early 2018. I couldn’t be more excited about it, and you can follow all development on https://github.com/aragon

Learn More

For more information about the Keep Network: