The Aragon Network (Aragon) is a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) whose goal is to act as a “digital jurisdiction” that aims to make it possible for organizations, entrepreneurs and investors to do business without a legal nexus.
Aragon was founded in 2016 and allows users to manage organizations using blockchain technology, with the goal of creating more efficient infrastructures. The network is a “digital jurisdiction” governed by stakeholders that can vote to create or amend laws included in the network’s “constitution”. Operation of the network is supported by fees which are collected from organizations and allocated based on the underlying governance model.
The core Aragon platform provides contracts that power the operations of decentralized organizations, as well as the contract upgradeability services and bug bounty mechanisms. The network’s decentralized “court” can resolve issues between organizations that leverage the aragonOS smart contract infrastructure as a governance system.
Aragon’s “court” serves as the backbone for the system’s decentralized governance. The court works at three different levels. First, the network assigns five random judges, who are required to stake ANT tokens to vote and resolve disputes. The judging process is set up as a prediction market where judges are incentivized to correctly bet on which party is right or wrong in a dispute. Dissenting (minority) judges lose their bonded stakes, which are paid to the winning judges.
Plaintiff’s in Aragon disputes are also required to post a stake of tokens, or, bond. If they lose, they can walk away with some of their stake, or double down and appeal by increasing the bond. This makes the case public to the entire network of judges and the voting process is repeated. If the plaintiff still doesn’t agree with the outcome of the network-wide judging, they may increase their bond again and appeal to the network’s Supreme Court, which is governed by the top nine judges in the network as measured by reputation, something earned through a combination of stake and prior prediction accuracy.
By making it possible for anyone in the world to organize digitally, Aragon seeks to enable borderless, permissionless entity creation and governance.