A timely reminder on the origins of blockchain project Aragon (ANT) has been posted on social media highlighting the correlation between the early vision of the founding team and current world events.
Although not directly associated with the project, the sentiments portrayed in the Aragon video have again come to the fore via a series of media posts from Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin who has expressed his view that we need to move beyond championing cryptocurrency for financial freedom as “…reforming money is not sufficient.”
Utopian Future?
Aragon’s stated goal is to empower communities by providing the necessary tools for removing centralised, top-down leadership and re-forming around shared values and resources. Such a structure is known as a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation (DAO).
As Aragon recognise, these DAOs can, and often will, see the founding idea that originally galvanised the community take “…on a life of its own, and it’s able to incentivise others to make it happen.”
Such a concept is open to interpretation and their early promotional video briefly touches upon the difficulties in clearly explaining a DAO to the general public.
In 2014, Buterin suggested that describing what a DAO truly is was no easy task; going as far as to say that defining a DAO “…is perhaps the holy grail, the thing that has the murkiest definition of all…”
In the same article, Buterin also touched upon the workings of Decentralised Autonomous Corporations (DACs) and how they differed from DAOs, in that DACs had shares and paid a dividend. This was fundamental as “A DAO is non-profit; though you can make money in a DAO [and] the way to do that is by participating in the ecosystem and not by providing investment into the DAO itself.”
He went on to stress that “…this distinction is a murky one; all DAOs contain internal capital that can be owned, and the value of that internal capital can easily go up as the DAO becomes more powerful/popular so a large portion of DAOs are inevitably going to be DAC-like to some extent.”
In February this year – possibly after coming to the same conclusion as Buterin – billionaire venture capitalist Tim Draper acquired a million ANT tokens in order to join the Aragon governance structure.
Earlier this week, the team at Aragon who still clearly believe DAOs can help achieve a more inclusive and beneficial society, reached out to their community for help to resolve the lack of wider understanding.
