Aragon Court and ANJ Pre-Activation

For projects looking to leverage a Distributed Autonomous Organization (otherwise known as a DAO), Aragon provides a suite of tools and interfaces to make these notions a reality.

As it currently stands, nearly 1000 unique organizations have been created on Aragon, all of which can be found here.

Aragon leverages a native token, Aragon Network Tokens ($ANT), which is used to help govern the Aragon protocol at large. In this article, we’ll be diving into the pre-activation period for Aragon’s new token – ANJ – which allows anyone to become a juror over outstanding DAO issues.

“Aragon Court handles subjective disputes that require the judgment of human jurors. These jurors stake ANJ which allows them to be drafted into juries and earn fees for successfully adjudicating disputes”

Getting Started

During the pre-activation period lasting from January 7th to February 10th, ANT holders can stake their tokens for early access to ANJ. Some important factors to consider include:

• 1 ANT equals 100 ANJ upon Aragon Court’s launch on mainnet.
• A minimum 10,000 ANJ (or 100 ANT) is required to become a juror
• Staked ANT will automatically be converted to ANJ
• ANJ will be locked until February 10th.
• ANJ pricing will be subject to a bonding curve following the pre-activation period.

How Disputes Work

From a high level, all jurors will be required to stake ANJ to be eligible to act as a juror. Jurors are randomly selected, with those staking larger amounts of capital be more likely to be selected as a juror.

Here’s how it works in practice:

1. Dispute Creation – Two parties disagree and a claim is filed with Aragon Court
2. Jury Selection – A pool of jurors is picked to govern the claim
3. Due Diligence – Jurors review evidence provided by the issuing parties
4. Preliminary Voting – Jurors vote on the outcome with the losing party being able to challenge the vote for an extra fee
5. Dispute Resolution – The outcome is finalized onchain and all ratifications are distributed.
6. Juror Rewards – Parties who voted for the winner share the stakes of the losing party.

Why Should I Care?

Similar to what we’ve seen with Nexus Mutual offering rewards for governance participation, Aragon Court takes this notion to the next level by allowing jurors to govern (and earn rewards) on disputes across all Aragon organizations. In practice this allows community members to add value to the ecosystem at large without having to acquire niche tokens for each unique organization.

We recently saw Kyber Network announce KyberDAO, a signal that more and more projects will continue to shift governance decisions into the hands of the larger community.

For those who have been following Aragon since inception, Aragon Court serves as a vital foundation for the grander vision of DAO management. As is stands today, there aren’t many tried and true systems for resolving disputes within DAOs.

This has commonly been due to the fact that DAOs are currently so small that there is rarely ever any major contention amongst shareholders. As we continue to watch DAOs evolve in size, systems like Aragon Court provide an interesting mechanism for unbiased third-parties to come in and settle an issue from a neutral standpoint.

Aragon Traction

Since the announcement of the pre-activation period, ANT has seen a surge in both volume and price, signaling that community members are eager to get started with Aragon Court.

As with many other prominent DeFi projects, it appears that DEXs like Uniswap and Kyber are quickly serving as the leading markets for acquiring ANT tokens, with liquidity pools drastically growing in volume over the course of the last 30 days.

The pre-activation period plays nicely into the idea of projects reworking their tokenomics as a means to better align incentives between their primary users.

Over the course of the next year, we fully expect Aragon to serve as a foundation for DAOs, DeFi projects and web 3 initiatives at large to coordinate ideas and funding on a distributed scale.

Now that dispute resolution will become entirely distributed, we can continue to watch the Ethereum landscape expand into the global system we’ve all come to know and love.

For more updates on Aragon, keep up with their official blog here.

In the meantime, be sure to stay up to date on all things DeFi with us here at DeFI Rate!