The Eagle: Aragon ZK Research Team Announces OVOTE Initiative

8 July 2022: ZK Research breaks new ground, Joan Arús steps in as new Executive Director of the Aragon Association, ETH Barcelona booth coupled with How To guides soft launch.

Jul 8, 2022

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The star of the show this week is OVOTE, a research initiative from the Aragon ZK Research team. This groundbreaking work, building on breakthroughs in digital voting from Vocdoni, is the new frontier for ZK tech in DAOs. We’ll dive deeper in the Weekly Highlight below.
Joan Arús steps in as the Executive Director of the Aragon Association. He brings strategic and executive skills to the table as a dedicated long-standing leader in the Aragon ecosystem. In his new role, he will focus on both driving tech and product execution, and ensuring the success of our progressive decentralization into a DAO.
Aragon was represented in an ETH Barcelona booth, coupled with the soft launch of our How To guides. We had many DAO builders stop by to share their biggest DAO problems, and are looking forward to connecting them with the DAO experts who can help.

Weekly Highlight: OVOTE

OVOTE research from the Aragon ZK Research team released this week on the forum, in conjunction with Arnau’s talk at ETH Barcelona.

The OVOTE research on ZK (Zero Knowledge) technology is the first step in allowing DAOs to vote offchain, then trustlessly execute the results onchain while saving gas. It will also unlock doors for private onchain voting. This research could be a “0-1 for DAOs,” as Aragon co-founder Luis commented.

Zero Knowledge is a cryptography concept that allows a verifier to confirm that something is true about another party, without that party having to share any information, or knowledge. It’s like asking someone if they know a secret code without them having to speak that secret code—you confirm they have the knowledge, but they never share the knowledge. It’s both secure and anonymous at the same time—a difficult balance to strike.

Think of when you’re signing a document and need to confirm that you’re over the age of 18 by writing down your birthday. A ZK proof allows you to confirm that you’re over 18 without sharing the date of your birth—therefore, preserving your data while still proving that you’re over 18.

The OVOTE design allows users to vote offchain and trigger onchain execution without oracles (something that “talks” to the blockchain and tells it things “outside” of the chain, such as the price of ETH or the weather in Barcelona) or optimistic multisigs (wallets that automatically trigger an execution unless a challenge is raised).

This is groundbreaking research that could change the landscape of DAO governance. We’re excited to have such a talented team releasing valuable research!

Aragon 🦅 @AragonProject

Today, @arnaucube presented OVOTE: Offchain Voting with Onchain Trustless Execution at @eth_barcelona

Current Votes

Take a governance breather! There are no current votes this week.

Recent Vote Results

Financial Proposal: Increase monthly allocation for ESD members

The proposal suggests an increase in the compensation for ESD members from 200 ANT per month to 200 ANT and 2,500 USDC/Dai per month. The proposal includes retroactive application of the said increase for May and June 2022.

Question 1: Increase ESD by USDC 2500 per month.

Results: 60.4% Yes, 22.6% No, 17.0% Abstain.

Question 2: Apply ESD compensation increase for May and June 2022.

Results: 60.4% Yes, 22.6% No, 17.0% Abstain.

Forum Proposals

OVOTE community presentation: Offchain voting and onchain trustless execution

The Aragon ZK Research team presented OVOTE, a voting mechanism that uses ZK (zero-knowledge) tech to trustlessly execute votes that occurred offchain.

S1 ESD Strategic Development Funding: Nominations

Nominate $2000 to reward @eaglelex as per the ESD Strategic Development Funding.

This $2,000 is for additional compliance work to review the CIP 0 Historic Versioning to ensure the Charter version 1.1.0 meets compliance requirements in advance of voting currently proposed to begin 22 July.

@eaglelex’s advice will be posted on the associated forum post and included in the final proposal format. The vote will not proceed in the current format if legally substantial changes are identified during the review.

Aragon Network Highlights

No blog posts released this week.

We connected with DAO builders at our booth in ETH Barcelona. Catch up on the fun:

In the booth, DAO builders placed stickers where they felt certain or uncertain about various elements of DAO creation, such as setting governance thresholds or choosing a legal wrapper. We’ll share the data collected from this board soon!

Harry and Marta wearing the traditional hats of Catalan.

Aragon Network branded wine, anyone?

The AN DAO is running a meme contest. Submit your meme by tagging the AragonDAO, and the top three memes each win 50 USDT!

Events

Weekly AMA: DAO Experts Series. The Future of Web3 Consulting with Bankless Consulting.

Join the conversation on Twitter Spaces every Friday at 2:30pm UTC.

Campfire #2: Error Culture

The Gravity DAO team will be leading their second campfire, this time on Error Culture. Join the conversation in the Aragon Discord server on Thursday, July 15 at 13:30 UTC.

Calls to Action

Learn about Zero Knowledge proofs and read up on the forum post, so you’re ready to talk about ZK at conferences and beyond!
Provide feedback on our How To guides at the forums on the bottom of this page, so we can prepare for the official launch soon!
Share your ideas to the Umbrella group on how trust is built: https://pol.is/84nccddd8p
Submit your meme to the AN DAO growth contest by tagging the AN DAO twitter account.

Talk of the DAO: How many DAO contributors does it take to screw in a light bulb? 💡

Talk of the DAO is a mini editorial from a contributor.

By Samantha Marin

Let me tell you a light bulb joke.

There are two ways this could go. Let’s start with the ineffective DAO way. Then, I’ll share what I think it should be. I’ll keep track of the number of contributors as we go.

Question: How many DAO contributors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Ineffective DAO Answer: First, a DAO contributor needs to come up with the idea to screw in the light bulb (1 contributor). Maybe they do a quick poll in Discord to see if anyone’s interested. Next, they draft up a forum post on the screwing of the light bulb, and they work back-and-forth with everyone interested in it for a couple weeks. Six people weigh in and start contributing (7 contributors).

When they’re finally ready, the document goes on the forum: AIP-256: New Light Bulb to Be Screwed—An Optimistic Look at Illumination. Another six contributors start actively commenting, but rather than simply approve the light bulb screwing, they get hung up on the type of light bulb (13 contributors). Is it LED? Soft white? Gentle yellow? Maybe it’s a clapper light bulb from the 90’s, where you clap your hands and all goes dark. Maybe we’re trying to save energy, so it’s a motion detector light bulb. Conversation stalls for awhile between clapper bulbs and motion detector bulbs. The clappers and the detectors get stuck in a tug-of-war of commenting, but eventually one of the lead clappers has a busy week of work and runs out of time to respond to all the detectors on the forum. Detectors emerge victorious.

The original poster watches quietly as the energy-saving motion detector bulb gains some sort of consensus of the most frequent commenters, even though the type of bulb was not even up for discussion based on the original forum post—the contributor originally wanted to use whatever was already in the storage closet. In the name of coordination and almighty Moloch, the original proposer goes along with the crowd: motion detector bulb it is.

That would be pricier to install, though, so two people from Finance come in and start crunching some numbers (15 contributors). If we’re going with a motion detector light bulb, they say, we need to bring in Legal to let us know if we’re compliant with spending the extra couple dollars—it’s a bear market, after all (17 contributors). While Legal goes back and forth, an idea for an Aragon Network Patented Light Bulb is proposed and quickly killed by three engineers (20 contributors). Finally, Legal grudgingly approves.

Now, we’re about ready to screw in the light bulb, right? Not quite—we need to complete the vote.

The major ANT holders (5 people, let’s say) aren’t paying attention to the light bulb discussion, so a DAO core member (1 person) needs to chase them down and remind them to vote (26 contributors). The vote runs for a bit, but we still need some ANT holders to reach quorum. A few members of the Communications team (3 people) come in to get the word out, adding it to various tweets and newsletters (28 contributors). Someone in the Discord (1 person) catches that the Comms team tweeted the wrong link—we vote on Aragon Voice, not Snapshot (29 contributors)! Delete and re-post is done by another Comms member (1 person) because of time zone differences (30 contributors). The tweet goes out, and the required ANT holders weigh in. Quorum is reached!

Whew! Done, right?

Not quite—it’s time to actually screw in the light bulb! Everyone looks around, trying to find the person who is going to screw it in….not me, nope, not me, I don’t have the light bulb, who has the light bulb? A quick scan of forum reveals the truth: everyone had moved onto the next task before finishing the first. And what’s next? Pouring the lemonade.

Contributor count: 30

Joseph Delong* @josephdelong

The DAO run lemonade stand: Little Jimmy is pouring glasses of lemonade for $0.50 each, which costs him $0.10 in materials. Meanwhile there are 1000 lemonade stand token holders crowded around the lemonade stand typing how to run the lemonade stand into the Discord

Question: How many DAO contributors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

Answer of an effective DAO: There’s a guild that hired contributors to deal with all illumination issues. Those contributors are experts, so they can spot when it’s time to screw in a new light bulb. Because their guild was approved to do these actions back when they requested the DAO for funding, they go ahead and screw in the light bulb. When they’re ready to apply for funding again, they document all instances of light bulb replacement for the DAO to review upon next funding cycle.

Contributor count: 2

DAOs don’t need to be slow or tedious, like they’re known to be today. I’m excited for Aragon to become a DAO that is so effective that we can screw in light bulbs in our sleep! Let’s build structures that are both equitable and effective.

Tell us your own light bulb jokes!

See you next week,

—the Comms team

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