13 people left in 5 days? People familiar with Aragon respond to "collective resignation"

Since the collective resignation of BitMEX executives in October last year, the encryption industry has seen another collective resignation of members.

The cause of the incident originated on January 7th, the Aragon Association (hereinafter referred to as AA), the initiator and current leader of the DAO solution provider Aragon ) Governance Director John Light updated the news. He published a long article on GitHub, saying that due to the huge changes within the team, he decided to leave the team that he had been in for almost three years.

After John Light resigned, another 11 employees of Aragon One (hereinafter referred to as AO), a for-profit company responsible for providing technology development services for AA, also announced their resignation, and the reasons for resignation were more or less different. Relating to John Light's open letter.

This is not over yet. Four days later, on January 12, Aragon co-founder and AO CEO Jorge Izquierdo announced on Twitter that he would resign as CEO. The reason is that after returning from a two-week vacation, he found that the team had made a series of decisions (mainly management aspects) that he disagreed with.

The old man leaves and the new man enters. On January 13, Aragon officials announced the arrival of 10 new employees—all of whom were the original members of the Vocdoni team that were acquired in December last year and just recently disclosed.

Ten in just one week More than one employee resigned, and so many employees joined at the same time. This phenomenon of "big change" in the team has aroused the attention of the industry. Rumors about high-level seizure of power and profit from selling coins have also spread in the community. As the most well-known project on the DAO track, what happened inside Aragon, what is the current progress, and how will it affect the project?

Finally unclear, seeking personal gain?

As of January 14, the Aragon team has not made an official response to the collective resignation of employees, but we can still find clues from the "restrained" resignation statements of John Light and Jorge Izquierdo.

The first is the financial issue that has attracted much attention.

John Light specifically mentioned in the open letter that the AA has always been known for its transparency, but "it has been lacking recently." He hopes that the agency will release all meeting minutes and financial reports for public review, "let ANT Holders and contributors are more involved in governance".

On January 13, Joe Charlesworth, the newly appointed executive director of AA, announced in the community the details of a transaction in which the team sold assets held by the project.

Screenshot Source: https://multisig.galtproject.io/#/0xcafe1a77e84698c83ca8931f54a755176ef75f2c/proposal/334

according to Joe Charlesworth disclosed that on December 10, 2020, AA agreed to sell 52156.28 ETH and exchange it for the corresponding BTC, ANT, USDC and USD. To this end, the team engaged a financial service partner to execute, and to reduce counterparty risk, the sale was conducted in two tranches, of which the first tranche has been fully completed and the second tranche is still in progress.

And this is also the main reason for the community to circulate "team selling coins". It is understood that some community members calculated that the team lost "at least 30 million U.S. dollars" based on the time when Aragon sold assets. However, this statement seems too far-fetched. By convention, after the completion of IC0, blockchain projects will indeed sell some ETH from time to time to prepare for schedule expenses, but it seems too picky to attribute the increase in the price of tokens after the sale to the project party.

DAOSquare founder and head of Aragon China, Typto, disagrees with this statement. He believes that "as far as selling coins is concerned, this is just a common hedging behavior" and "selling coins is only a small part of "" not for personal gain."

< p line="5IU8" style="user-select: auto;">So, of more concern is what happens to the ETH after it is sold, but according to Joe Charlesworth, AA's assets are held by multiple banks and custody providers, The trading platform and the Aragon Budget DAO are jointly held, and it has not yet been seen that some people have obtained personal benefits from the sale.

In addition to the token sale, the outside world also suspects that Aragon's recent acquisition has caused high-level divisions.

The real reason?

Jorge Izquierdo mentioned in his resignation statement that the main reason for his departure was the decision made by the team in management that was contrary to his opinion during the vacation. So which decisions may lead to disagreements among high-level officials?

According to media reports, Aragon’s acquisition of the Estonian company Dvote Labs Oü occurred in December 2020. The company’s CFO Joan Arus said in an interview with the media that the acquisition was paid using the token ANT. The amount was undisclosed.

In the future, the Vocdoni protocol developed by the company will be merged with Aragon, and the original team will also be merged into Aragon, which is the news that the 10 employees mentioned at the beginning of the article joined Aragon. However, the acquisition should have nothing to do with Jorge Izquierdo's departure.

According to Jorge Izquierdo, he emphasized that his departure was mainly a change in the governance of the AA, and he disagreed with these resolutions and the process by which they were made.

Jorge Izquierdo did not specify what the resolution was, but Rhythm checked the recent topics on the Aragon forum and Jorge Izquierdo's recent dynamics. He recently (January 8) was the first to respond to Aragon's other Co-founder Luis Cuende expressed strong opposition to the latter proposal regarding the proposal to "accelerate the merger of ANT-ANJ tokens".

< a href="https://forum.aragon.org/t/an-implementation-proposal-for-the-ant-anj-merger-no-lock/2530" target="_blank" style="user-select: auto;">Original link

According to this, Rhythm boldly speculates that a large part of the reason for Jorge Izquierdo's resignation is the merger of ANJ/ANT, which eventually triggered the two founders The conflict headed by the two camps.

It is understood that in order to improve the utilization rate of Aragon Court and reduce the confusion of multiple tokens in the system, Aragon put forward a proposal to merge ANJ/ANT last year. On October 11, 2020, the latest governance proposal initiated by the Aragon community was passed. The ANJ in the original token economy system will be merged back into ANT, and every 1 ANJ will be converted to 0.015 ANT, and the ANJ token will be cancelled.

. For example, ANT holders believe that if ANJ is merged and converted into ANT, the supply of ANT will be increased by more than 540,000 pieces, and it is unreasonable that "there will be no benefits or compensation for ANT holders".

Later, in order to find a balanced solution, Aragon chose to suspend the resolution and communicate with the community further. In November, after several rounds of iterations and more than a dozen proposals, the plan was finally finalized on November 25. The new plan includes two options: one is to exchange 1 ANJ for 0.044 ANT, which needs to be locked for one year and activated in the Aragon protocol; the other is to exchange 1 ANJ for 0.015 ANT, which does not require a lock-up.

The subsequent work of AA and AO will also focus on implementing smart contracts and interfaces to ensure smooth exchange.

After reconciling the interests of multiple parties, everything seems to be advancing steadily. However, on January 8 this year, Luis Cuende of Aragon Co., Ltd. released new progress in the forum, proposing a new proposal to "speed up" the exchange speed for ANJ holders who chose option 1.

However, once the plan was proposed, it was quickly opposed by Jorge Izquierdo. Judging from the above screenshots, the reason for his objection is that the whole scheme needs centralized entities (AA and community multi-signature) to operate, not one-time, but on the basis of repeated operations. Not to mention the centralized operation, "This solution may also have an impact on the price of the secondary market."

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In his opinion, casting ANT should be a Seriously, community multisig should not be used in scenarios like this. "I can't understand why this poor proposal should be passed in order to save "1 month" (in my professional opinion, this smart contract only needs to be completed and reviewed in a few days)? It goes against space and common sense best practice and has little long-term benefit."

From the results, the discussion did not reach a consensus. Since multi-signatures are involved, there will inevitably be confirmation and changes of multi-signature members, and whether to let these people decide the important changes related to Aragon, at least there is no agreement between the two founders.

Revelation

Should the major decisions of the blockchain project be made by a small number of people, or should it follow the way of community autonomy and smart contract execution? This is not only a problem for Aragon, but also a dilemma for all blockchain projects, especially DAO, when they operate.

Since this year, with the opportunity of popular DeFi projects issuing governance tokens, DAO has caused a round of upsurge, among which Aragon, Snapshot and other projects are represented.

As an old project founded in 2017, the two founders of Aragon from Spain are trying to explore a new form of organization that can cross borders, distributed, and borderless. And this new attempt and vision attracted many people, including John Light.

The two founders of Aragon

< p line="YgFP" style="user-select: auto;">“If power becomes centralized, it doesn’t have to be accountable to anyone but itself. Decentralization is crucial to reducing corruption over time Important" John Light quoted Aragon's manifesto in his resignation announcement, "We must strive to create systems that allow many different stakeholders to have a voice, so that the community can manage public goods responsibly."

 

Previously, Jorge Izquierdo shared the paper Aragon manifesto and white paper on Twitter , "I love this picture so much"

< p line="qQtC" style="user-select: auto;">After two or three years of exploration, differences emerged within the team. Luis Cuende's side may want the project to move forward more efficiently, thinking that some decisions are understandable for a few people to participate; obviously, Jorge Izquierdo, like John Light, and 11 other AO employees who left, are committed to decentralization and have no intention of change. When the two sides can no longer reconcile, even the partners who started the business together in the past can only part ways.

It is worth noting that Jorge Izquierdo said that after resigning from the CEO position of AO, he still serves as a member of the AA board of directors, and judging from the forum discussion, he has not left the Aragon community.

"We can't pursue an idealized DAO, we need to achieve it gradually and step by step, so there will be trade-offs and choices in this process...Many community participants have not gone deep into problems and practice, and use idealization and theory It is actually unfair to ask for certain things with a culturalized thinking.”

Typto believes, "Many times decision-making requires trade-offs. What is the most important issue at this moment? Is it efficiency or satisfying everyone? Obviously, in this matter, efficiency More important than making everyone happy. Because you know the ANJ/ANT thing has been dragging on for a long time".

Just, this time We will continue to pay attention to whether the situation that efficiency seems to win temporarily is a good thing for a DAO project like Aragon.

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