Summary

We propose deploying an upgraded instance of Aragon Court as Aragon Protocol using ANT as its staking token.

Motivation

The Aragon Network aims to create a digital jurisdiction where new forms of digital organizations can thrive.

We saw early on that the need for a dispute resolution protocol was core to that vision's success and started building a subjective oracle protocol (Aragon Court) in late 2018, as well as many other pieces of infrastructure to enable these types of organizations to succeed.

Currently, governance rights over the Court protocol are granted exclusively to ANT holders, and participation rights (to earn dispute and usage fees) in the Court are granted exclusively to ANJ holders. This separation was deemed necessary to isolate the incentives of Court participation from the incentives of other potential service protocols that might be created and connected to ANT in the future (eg Aragon Chain), and to ensure that the incentives of court participants were divergent enough to provide a check on the decision making power of a majority-rule based voting policy.

This structure positions the Aragon Network as a hub that deploys capital into the development of various connected protocols with the Court being one such protocol. However, it’s our position that this is not a good path forward for the network as it splits focus and creates factions which must vie for resources and attention. We believe it would be much wiser to focus all resources, attention, and efforts into developing, promoting, and building tooling to support a single Aragon Protocol.

With a singular focus, the separation of rights between ANJ and ANT become unnecessary. We do not need to worry about isolating incentives across multiple potential protocols, and can tune Aragon Protocol using time-based staking parameters to ensure there is sufficient divergence among participants in the protocol and the larger population of ANT holders participating in governance.

Specification

If this vote is approved:

• Aragon One will audit and deploy an upgraded version of the original court protocol with some added enhancements such as modified time-based staking parameters, ruling delegation for cold/hot wallet setups, a more flexible payments system (giving the AN DAO ability to introduce custom payment models at runtime), and an improved upgrading process. Aragon One expects, but doesn't commit to, Aragon Protocol to be live and operational before the end of 2020.
• Aragon One will decide the initial parametrization of Aragon Protocol with its governor being the interim governance council of the Aragon Network; the council commits to setup a vote for that transfer of power when the Aragon Network DAO is ready. Although Aragon One will choose parameters at its own discretion, the conditions to become a guardian will be similar to those for becoming a juror under the old Aragon Court protocol rules.
• Aragon One's deployed instance will be referred to as Aragon Protocol and will use ANT as its staking token.
• Aragon Govern will use Aragon Protocol as its default resolver for optimistic vote challenges and subjective disputes over votes. Other products and projects developed by Aragon One paid for by Aragon Association grants will use Aragon Protocol if there's a need for a subjective oracle.
• Aragon One will immediately stop maintaining Aragon Court, and instead focus on building and enhancing Aragon Protocol.
• Aragon One will shut down all infrastructure supporting Aragon Court no less than 45 days from this vote being approved. Given that all code is open source, a motivated party could easily run these services.
• Aragon Association will not relicense the Aragon Court codebase nor any of its supporting services, and it will be kept available under the GPL-3.0 license or the current license the different components have (some parts are licensed under MIT and will be kept MIT licensed)

Additional community votes would be required to determine the future of ANJ and Aragon Court, whether there's a merger of some kind, independence from the Aragon Network, or some other path forward. Aragon One is currently collaborating with Delphi Digital on a proposal to merge ANJ with ANT and provide additional rewards to ANJ holders who commit to locking up their ANT once they accept the merger offer. We will share more details about this proposal with the community as soon as possible.

Urgency

This proposal represents a critical decision for the community.

Reaching a decision where all stakeholders feel comfortable with the outcome is of the utmost importance. However, reaching a decision is a dependency for further development, strategic resource allocation, and the Aragon Govern upcoming launch, because these subsequent decisions depend a great deal on whether we are proceeding as a hub connecting many service protocols, or optimizing our resources to maximize the value of a single protocol.

Given the importance of this decision, we will be holding another town hall meeting on Aragon's Discord tentatively happening on Thursday November 5th at 5pm UTC (final details to be confirmed closer to the date)