Aragon Govern: The Missing Piece of the Decentralised Governance Puzzle - Decentralise #11
Aragon and Balancer Lab's Snapshot Collaboration Levels Up Decentralised Communities
The Multisig Dilemma
On Friday the Aragon team launched a developer preview of Govern, a brand new platform designed to radically empower and secure decentralised communities.
Aragon has been around for years, and their DAO framework has been a vital asset for decentralised communities, securing over $300m and powering 1,500 DAOs.
But in the recent DeFi boom gas prices pushed many projects away from Aragon’s on-chain governance system. At times it could cost over $500 to set up a decentralised autonomous organisation.
Many projects have turned to Snapshot, a gas-free off-chain solution from Balancer Labs that allows communities to suggest and vote on governance proposals. It’s a smooth user experience, but has a major flaw.
Because the system is off-chain communities are reliant on the good will of centralised multisig owners to enact their decisions.
This is the present difficult situation many decentralised communities currently find themselves.
Aragon Govern changes everything.
Aragon Govern
This limitation fades away with Aragon Govern, which promises off-chain voting with on-chain execution. Put simply, affordable off-chain community decisions can be enacted on-chain without centralisation.
It manages to achieve this through ERC-3000 and an Optimistic design. In short, the system functions by assuming that a proposal has good intentions, moving to enact it on-chain unless proven otherwise. Proposals require a collateral lockup, which is lost if the proposal is discovered to be malicious. As anybody can challenge a proposal bad actors are discouraged from participating.
The design is simple and developer focused, with just 500 lines of code in comparison to AragonOS’s 5,000.
The design is the first step in a long-term collaboration between Aragon and Balancer, with both projects committing $100k each of their token to fund further development.
Aragon’s Govern is the missing piece of the decentralised governance puzzle, and it seems likely this will be the new standard.
I’m looking forward to seeing decentralised communities adopt Govern and covering their developments here. Keep up to date by subscribing.
Learn more about Govern.