3 lessons from 6 years of building secure DAO frameworks
Applying what we learned in the original product stack to build a better experience for DAOs, CTO shares a future for multichain DAOs on Aragon, Community-built dApp for investment DAOs leverages OSx
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Amidst growing global challenges and the exponential rise of technology, human organization has never been so crucial. The way we coordinate and collaborate today will determine not just the success, but the survival, of humanity. DAOs—organizations run on blockchains—are one of the best options we have for fast, transparent, secure organization. At Aragon, we’ve been building secure DAO frameworks since 2017, and we’ve learned a lot along the way. In this article, we shared some of the most common user feedback on the original Aragon stack (Aragon OS and Aragon Client) and how we’ve applied it to our new stack (Aragon OSx and Aragon App) so that anyone—whether it’s a group of five friends or a network state—can build an unstoppable organization on the blockchain.
Carlos, CTO, shared his ideas on what multichain DAOs could look like at Aragon. “DAOs need to securely govern and operate across chains via their deployment, not through trusted components. Likewise, we need DAO liquidity to flow more easily and cheaply between L1’s and L2’s,” he wrote. “If we aim to be the Homebase for your DAO, then the next step is to help you make interchain calls right.” Share your thoughts and feedback on multichain DAOs in a comment.
Meet Libree: One Click Investment DAOs. Libree is a community-built dApp on Aragon OSx that makes it easy to build investment DAOs. Their team forked the Aragon App frontend and added extra features that investment DAOs need, like a uniswap and NFT collector plugin right in the UI! Check out their dApp, currently in public beta, here!
3 lessons from 6 years of building secure DAO frameworks
Amidst growing global challenges, effective organization has never been so crucial. Now is a time that we need digital organization tools and secure DAOs more than ever. From climate change to AI to humanitarian crises, organization will be the key to humanity not only succeeding, but surviving.
And along with these challenges, we’re facing an exponential acceleration in technological innovation, which only adds fuel to the fire.
Through collaboration and effective organizations, we can make better decisions to tackle these challenges together. Currently, our governance structures are not equipped to adapt, especially not at the speed we need them too.
We need to embed adaptability within our governance structures to increase our ability to respond to the growing challenges and changing world around us.
Enter: adaptable, modular DAOs built on Aragon OSx.
Here are the three lessons we learned from building Aragon OS and Client, and how we applied them to create our new modular, adapatable stack: Aragon OSx and App.
Lesson 1: Move from complexity, towards simplicity
When building our new stack, we conducted user interviews across the ecosystem. One word that came up in almost every interview we did was “complex."
We needed to find a way to make the logic extendable without compromising on simplicity and ease of use.
It’s why we focused on plugins as the main source of our new protocol's functionality. Rather than building a deterministic product full of embedded functionality, we wanted to embed adaptability into our product.
Lesson 2: Great user experience is crucial for enabling healthy, secure DAOs
If our technology cannot be used by every human, whether they are builders or community members, then we are severely limiting the potential of what DAOs can accomplish.
The original Aragon stack was powerful and advanced for the time, but difficult to use. DAOs with complex needs like Lido found their home there, but the stack was daunting and difficult to experiment with for new users.
Because web3 is a paradigm shift in how we interact on the internet, it’s incredibly hard to make onchain experiences intuitive.
So, we embedded education into the experience with links to guides and tool tips that help you make important decisions, such as how to set governance parameters for your DAO. We also provided more descriptive error messages, details about the steps you're taking, and explanations about why they're important. This makes participating in your DAO more secure, because you understand what exactly you are doing onchain.
Lesson 3: Center our focus on inclusivity of all types of DAO builders
The first Aragon OS was built with Solidity engineers in mind, because we assumed those were the people building in crypto. But what we missed was the realization that if we wanted the entire engineering power to come to web3, we had to build for other types of engineers building in other languages as well.
It’s critical we give more builders access to building on the blockchain, in their own coding language or with no-code tools. We adapted our stack to meet the needs of a wider range of builders, technical and non-technical alike!
A huge step towards our goal to make DAOs inclusive of all types of builders is the launch of our new Smart Contract Composer, a tool that allows any DAO to connect to any smart contract in the ecosystem without writing any code.
This means DAOs no longer need to operate in a silo. They can connect to the functionalities of other contracts and execute actions directly from the App.
Building on our legacy and starting a new chapter for DAOs
This stack is built upon Aragon's foundation of security, freedom, and openness, but marks a new chapter for DAOs. And with our new stack, we take one step closer towards delivering our mission: enabling everyone to experiment with governance at the speed of software.
Solving the great challenges ahead will require us to collaborate more innovatively and effectively. We don’t have the answers, you do.
We create tools to help you build the new forms of organization and coordination the world so desperately needs.
Join us 💙 🦅
And check out the recording of the keynote about these lessons by Juliette, Developer Advocate:
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Multichain DAOs on Aragon
Carlos, CTO, shared thoughts on a multichain future for DAOs.
How is he approaching it?
“Your main governance contract should be able to call wherever a new fancy protocol gets you the highest APY. So I developed the generic architecture on which to plug the different bridges.
I decided to go for a Clone Factory to deploy the execution proxies of the DAOs. It doesn't get cheaper than having your L1 DAO rule over a swarm of proxies ready to take over all chains!”
We’d love to hear what you think about multichain DAOs. Leave your feedback as a comment in the twitter thread:
Libree: Community-built dApp for launching and managing Investment DAOs
Libree enables one-click investment DAOs on Aragon OSx.
This dApp was built by community members and is a fork of the Aragon App that has extra functions for investment DAOs.
When creating your DAO you can choose plugins directly in the UI!
You can also create asset management strategies and put them up to vote in your DAO. Then, if the vote passes, the strategy becomes executable.
Libree is in open beta and maintained by the Libree team. Try it out today!
Events
Alex Kampa from the Aragon ZK Research guild will be speaking at the web3 privacy summit in Prague on June 5. Learn more.
Aragon offsite: Next week, Aragon DAO guilds will be gathering for a week of in-person work, alignment, and workshops.
CTAs
Dive into the details of a multichain future for DAOs built on Aragon and leave your feedback in a comment.
Try Libree, a community-built dApp for investment DAOs.
Have a great weekend!
—Aragon Growth Guild