Aragon 0.5 (Beta) — The Architect

Read the announcement blog post

On March 30th, 2017 we released the alpha version of The Governance Release, Aragon Core v0.3. That version, while a pretty nice user friendly DApp, was mostly a prototype. Some early architectural decisions, like using Meteor and how coupled it was to a particular organization type, made us decide to do a full refactor of the codebase and completely call off Aragon Core v0.4, as it wasn’t productive to keep building on a codebase we considered obsolete.

From that point on we began an introspection process exploring what we wanted Aragon to be. That is what has taken us to where we are today after almost a year of very intense work. Some people in the space that are not part of the team think we are too ambitious and that we should focus on one-off spin-offs for determinate use cases. We couldn’t disagree more and with this release we feel extremely confident about everything that can be built on Aragon with very little effort at this point, and how many different governance structures can be created with it.

This release has been in the works for nearly a year and we couldn’t be more excited to put it out now and start gathering feedback from our future users. There will still be some rough edges and things that we need to fix before we can call this a real production release. Please use the #feedback channel in Aragon.Chat to provide feedback and ask for help.

Even though we do not recommend deploying to Mainnet yet, until some extra security measures have been taken, it is certainly possible and there are some skilled community members that have already done so. Please be aware that even though would just take flipping a switch to go to Mainnet, we don't consider it secure and strongly advice against doing so. Anyway, this is open source software and you are free to do whatever you please (unless you break our GLPv3.0 copyleft license, which we wouldn't like but our lawyers would love) with it under your own judgement and responsibility.

If the beta goes well, the bug bounty is successful in getting hackers interest, but they are unsuccessful in breaking our system and the second audit gives green light too, Aragon organizations will be able to be deployed to Mainnet in a few months. We don't want to give a date, as we won't encourage anyone to use it in production after our own money has been at stake for a while and feel super confident about it.

This release also makes Aragon, the software to run unstoppable organizations, unstoppable itself. If we were to disappear right now, you would be able to run your organization forever and we have no control over it. We are very nuclear about building the best possible product but with the most liberating, decentralized technology possible, powered by open source software, Ethereum and IPFS, Aragon is one of the first, non-trivial, decentralized applications ever made. There is certainly a bit of centralized infrastructure to make the experience easier for casual users, but running a completely trustless, hosted version of Aragon shouldn't take more than 10 minutes we will work on instructions for this soon.

What's on Aragon v0.5

TLDR: Go try the new DApp on Rinkeby NOW!

It is worth noting that there is not one line of code in Aragon Core v0.5 being reused from the previous releases. So, given the huge amount of changes these release notes will be kept pretty high-level for brevity.

Also this release is just a full DApp (served using IPFS), we have discontinued the native clients for the time being.

This release is not only the decentralized app, but also the first release of our developer tooling. It will soon be possible to build Aragon apps that take advantage of the powerful aragonOS. For more information to get hacking quick, check out the draft at https://hack.aragon.one

App can be tested in the Rinkeby testnet: https://app.aragon.one

aragon/aragon v0.5 (aka the wrapper)

• Complete refactor to a new modular architecture
• Support for running first and third Aragon apps completely sandboxed from the rest of the app. It supports for running multiple instances of one app in an organization.
• Brand new Onboarding process with different templates to start organizations.
• Brand new signer view that provides accurate descriptions of the transactions the user will sign
• Brand new Notifications view and workflow.
• Brand new Permissions app (read-only for now) compatible with any organization or protocol that uses aragonOS.

aragon/aragon-apps

• Brand new Voting app: binary-choice that can be used for performing arbitrary actions in the organization or signaling.
• Brand new Finance app: with economic abstraction, Aragon organizations can hold and manage ERC20 assets and ETH.
• Brand new TokenManager app: for minting, burning, issuing normal and vested tokens. Allows for the creation of non-transferable tokens that can be used as a multisig.
• Brand new Vault app: which at the moment doesn't have a frontend, but it is what the Finance app uses to store funds. This new app allows support for any token standard, ERC721 and ERC777 support is coming soon.

aragon/aragonOS v3.1.1

• All Aragon DAOs and apps in this release work with the latest release of aragonOS 3.
• Brand new Kernel and ACL that replaces the old Bylaws.
• Full organization upgradeability (every part of a DAO can be upgraded with the correct permissions)
• New Aragon Package Manager as an Aragon org, that allows for seamless app upgrades (both contract and frontend)

aragon/aragon.js

• We have separated the JS library that is used to interact with Aragon DAOs to its own repo, this allows for easily creating different clients (different UIs, mobile apps or CLIs)
• Load state of organization, its different apps and ACL permissions from the blockchain.
• Cache state locally for quicker and leaner loads.
• Support for aragonOS transaction pathing, which allows users to indicate their directly on an app, and it will calculate what needs to happen (e.g create a vote)
• Radspec integration for describing transactions.
• Aragon ID integration for identity management.

aragon/radspec

• Safer alternative to Ethereum’s natspec.
• Basic DSL (Domain Specific Language) for describing and computing the side effects of transactions.
• Calls to contracts (e.g. getting the token symbol from a token address)
• Basic math arithmetic
• ABI is baked in to the descriptions themselves, so no need to bundle ABIs for all of your contracts dependencies

aragon/aragon-id

• ENS based simple identity system that uses aragonid.eth to issue subdomains to users for representing their identity.
• Secure ENS subdomain issuer to protect against misuse by the domain owner in the registrar, while at the same time allowing the transition to the new registrar when upgraded.

aragon/aragon-dev-cli

• First release of our CLI for developing Aragon apps. All Aragon apps that are part of this release where published using aragon-dev-cli.
• Create new Aragon apps from our provided templates.
• Create new repos in APM and publish versions to those.
• Implementation of IPFS and HTTP (dev mode) file provider to host app content.

aragon/aragon-ui v0.6

• Our design framework with React components that are used to build the wrapper and our own Aragon apps.
• Published a website to showcase components: https://ui.aragon.one
• 24 components have been released with this version: AragonApp, Badge, BadgeNumber, BaseStyles, Button, Card, CircleGraph, ContextMenu, Countdown, DropDown, Field, Footer, HOC, Header, IllustratedSection, Info, Input, LayoutGrid, Link, PreFooter, Radio, Section, SidePanel and Table.
• External third party apps are already using aragon-ui for non-Aragon apps like tcr-ui

Coming soon to Aragon Core v0.5.x

After this big release we are getting into a 2 week release cycle, that means every two weeks we will release whatever is production ready and deploy the new frontend to all our users.

On top of that we are working on a Continuous Deployment pipeline that will do a release every time new code gets merged in the master branch or aragon/aragon. Every two weeks we will take one of these releases and make it the canonical Aragon Core v0.5.x.

aragon/aragon

• AppManager to install new instances of apps in an organization as well as upgrading installed apps or the organization Kernel and ACL.
• Full Permissions app. Right now Permissions is read-only given its complexity and big opportunity for failure.
• Identity app to manage a user identity and better integration throughout apps.

aragon/aragon-apps

• Payroll, Staking and Registry apps. Smart contracts are almost ready. UI design for Payroll is ready and needs frontend work. Staking and Registry UI design is being kicked off this very week, which will allow to run TCRs on Aragon. You can follow design work in aragon/design.

What’s not on this release

• We have decided to discontinue the Fundraising app given how difficult it was for us to adapt it to different fundraising schemes. It is really easy for third parties to build a Fundraising app that mints tokens using the TokenManager on participation. We also don’t want Aragon to be an ICO-in-a-box product.
• Native clients have been discontinued for the moment as we are rethinking our strategy to secure high-stakes usage of Aragon.