#236 Luis Cuende: Aragon - Decentralized Governance and the Fight for Freedom

Transcript

[Music] this episode of epicenter is brought to by kenosis an open platform for businesses to create their own prediction market applications on top of a theorem network they recently launched venosus X a challenge inviting developers to build apps on top of the kenosis platform to learn more go to epicenter of TV slash gnosis X hello and welcome to episode of the show which talks about the technologies projects and startups driving east centralization and the global blockchain revolution my

name is Baron Fabien Crain and I'm here today with Luis Quinta he's the CEO of Aragon one Aragon is a very exciting product working on the centrist governance of building decentralized organizations of course the AOS are something that everyone in the space has or most people have some recollection off of the immature early beginnings and now Aragon is one of those projects as really are is trying to make that a viable option for the future so thanks so much for joining us today or me today Luis yeah thank you for inviting me yeah so it's been really fascinating reading a bit about Aragon since I've been reading this book called the sovereign individual I'm so I'm reading it right

now and I've heard about it quite a bit from different people in the boxing industry kind of mentioning all this book has influenced them and I've been reading this book and it's so much you know it's almost a perfect it talks basically about how people can become their own sovereignty and you know be sort of in control of their own life much more and have cryptographic assets and organisations banished that way and this is written in the 90s and now Aragon is basically building that of course the whole block chain space is build a much of that but especially something like the centrist governance yeah I think it's exciting to see how these people could have predicted something like this but I think you know

where we're building off ideas people have been high for some time even like the AOS the first idea was I 2014 or something like that but I used takes time to actually execute and have something out that people can use yes sir how do you first become interested in involved in the blockchain space so this was 2011 and I first read about Bitcoin in 2009 via hacker news and when I saw when I saw it I thought you know super cool but this is like technically not possible so this is probably like a scam or something and then in 2011 I read the white paper and then I was I've blown away because it gets together two other things that I liked the most

which is technology and freeing humans and liberating humans so I think it's a very powerful tool and you was like aroud the whole banking crisis it was hitting him in Spain where I'm from I'm sorry resonated with like what my environment needed and what I needed to be a more free people cool and that's that's pretty amazing that you heard about in 2009 that's very very early so one of the things that so I think you've also got some sort of title as like youngest hacker in Europe or some or some sort of thing like that but then one of the things he did was that you were an advisor to the European

Commission about technology of course European Commission being kind of the main governance body off of Europe so can you share with like how did that end up and what kind of lessons or learnings 2d half there that kind of shaped how are you going about Aragon today it was a very fun experience because I was like 16 when I could have started and like I was like a 16 year all like sitting with like a lot of like people order the meat and actually like the the VP of the European Commission who was like seventy years old and and she was asking me for feedback so that was that was kind of amazing and I it was all the same time I was kind of frustrated because for example I remember it was about that

time when they cookie law passed and now you have this or like terrible cookie messages like you know you have to said that the vendor like the server is gonna use cookies to track you or whatever and I try to very strongly oppose because that I liked in other ways you can track people but then you figure out like people in the government they rarely know technology so something that I think it's important an important takeaway is that things move super slow and even if you had right people they probably don't know what they are talking about so I don't see that we like I've been trying to incorporate it to Aragon as possible like let's try to not rely on people who don't know what they are talking about in order to build

the future yeah no I think that's a very good point then any of course that reminds me of another book that I read in last years that influenced me a lot which was Paco Medeiros which presumably many people have read but there he talked a lot about how just the entire political process is becoming you know incapable of keeping up with things and that sounds like a great example of it and of course we're seeing it a lot in the box in space so then how how did you end up starting Aragon what's kind of the origin story of that it's a complex story so we were working on a super unrelated thing back in the day both both Jorge and me we were working

on a start tab to fight against patent trolls who are these persons or companies who buy or like patent is still be the stuff like a printer for example and then they go and sue everyone using that patent so there were like super crazy cases like a guy who patented Wi-Fi like printing over Wi-Fi and then went to every single small business who had a printer and was I hate you owe me a million dollars for using a printer so that was very broken and from from our open-source background we try to fix that and so away because they are they are hurting nobody seem so mad and so we went to the valley to live there and raise some VC funds and like

go a traditional start a proud and and then at some point we figured out like it is really worthless like you cannot try to change this without changing the rules so like patent trolls are a huge problem and everyone knows about it even the government like the u.s. Goldman knows that the innovators have wasting billions of dollars a year in this patent trolls are not creating anything new they are not improving anything so we figured out you know maybe the problem is nobody knows maybe the problem is governance is broken because we have these corporations we're constantly low again to get their interests happen versus the interests of the people of the innovators of actually the builders so we have to fix the

underlying thing which is we have to fix governance and then also around that time was when Donald Trump won the US elections and we were living in the US and we were trying to to get a visa to like more permanently be there and it was so hard because like business in the US have super hard for some reason and it's finally but he's a country made of like you know like people who came all around the world to work there but any of you want to build something do get into like visa travel all day so it was from the ten internal travel warning we were just like you know this is not gonna be the place where things happen anymore and it's very very very clear very apparent that governance is broken at a crazy macro level like the whole US

had a governess failure electing this leader so let's build something so people can coordinate easily and we can experiment with in governess methods because the traditional ones don't work anymore yeah okay and what made you think that it was the right time to start project focus on governance you know on the blockchain I think it was a fact that like humankind needs it so much like I think Donald Trump was well I think that all trap is like you know bad for America or the other hand it's so good for crypto because it is the perfect case like you know we have to hurry up we are we are confronting a lot of dystopian futures that could happen and a lot of like super dystopian societies

and leaders that are being elected and very radical leaders and so we have to you know to stand up and fight for it so you know these things things a lot of time maybe for ideas to be usable by demands it will be a couple of years we need to develop so much technology in this tag you know throw her the blocks in itself to like really make it user-friendly for people to use it so you know what see it was the right time because a theory was work in and out there and you could make a smart contract and the world desperately needs it so you mentioned before the call that there's also a background story behind you know the word or the name Eragon what's that

story yes basically there is this a small region in what not that small in Spain called Aragon and basically like no one knows about this because winners get to write history but there was a period of like six years in in this region where he was it was pure anarchism and it worked and this was before the internet even and it worked beautifully it was like a small community organizing between themselves in totally free way but then you know the sort of like estate guys came in and killed everyone and so it was like forgotten forever and only like in some books here and there but it's a fact

that these deities can exist and they can video and they can be guests and they can work we just have to nurture them and make them something appealing to people but they have a sister before even before the internet so now that we have the internet we can recreate them and they would be much more powerful that world the way Aragon Aragon worked back then what do you like about it what worked well I think there is a lot of there was a lot of empathy there because when you have to organize with a small group of people you can know what the problems are you can do I do it communicate better we're just having like a 50 or 500 million country where it's very hard to emphasize with with

people from all over the country they have different problems different different incentives so I think that worked out very well and then like making everything as often as possible which I think it's a side effect of decentralization of power I think that's very powerful and that makes humans fully realize their their creativity and their freedom and you know they makes them feel like they have succeeded in life versus is having so very hierarchical system telling you what to do which is what happened then after anarchism was doing in Aragon cool so one of the things I was reading preparing for this episode was the the manifesto so you guys wrote a manifesto

and in there one of the phrases is so that without the global conscious and concerted effort the outlook is incredibly bleak so that I'm talking about you know what's ahead for the human race so what is this thing that you know what are you afraid of like what what do you think does that trajectory is that is so scary I think in the everyday we get used to stuff yes because like you know we live in day to day and the changes in day to day may not seem very significant but what you look back like 40 years ago and you think about you know tax systems or you think about how we used to pay you know like tax systems they they were not that

efficient like right now there are condition the world increase like the most powerful supercomputers are just working for the tax system and and they are just working with like you know communist industry there are recognizing people for you know terrorism and then you have the NSA of course and you have all of these programs trained to spy on citizens because they want to prevent again terrorism and then you have facts about you know who is actually causing these terrorism for what actual reason so why are there incentives to do so and so you discover a lot of these stuff and it looks like a like a black mirror episode like there are some black mirror episodes that I think that happened in reality like for example tonight is

starting to incorporate these sort of Minority Report you know prediction of criminal activities to even you know maybe in the future incarcerate people before they have even committed a crime so that's terrible and that's the that's the use of technology of humanity is doing and technology soon will be used for deaths who've used actually liberate ourselves if you look up like 40 years ago people were hopeful about technology they were like yeah you know machines will work for us they will liberate us we will be able to focus more on creativity and stuff like that and then we're having the exact opposite direction we are being spied upon we are being oppressed and we've been working more hours than you know all their generations and so

we're enslaved but by depth and stuff like that so I think that is the future that we want avoid at all costs yeah so really that surveillance totalitarian surveillance state which of course it completely right it is the trajectory so obvious and it's it's kind of amazing how people don't you know don't stenography one one example that always strikes me so much is in London right if you're on the if you're on the tube and they keep having these announcements it's like you know if you see anything suspicious you know reported immediately and then it see it's a it's sorted or something like that and it's exactly

like some sort of Orwellian tyranny but people just get used to it yeah so in in in this quote of course the second thing right so this is bleak thing and then says okay but what's what's needed is a global conscious and concerted effort what does that look like I think it just looks like the like a theorem community for example it's very like on one hand is very chaotic and it's very organic but on the other hand we sort of agree that we serve some values and we work together to keep those values in our case we're trying to actually describe those values in the manifesto very well so we all know that we are in the same page because if not

down the road if you don't prepare the systems to be or these communities to be that way then you end up having stuff like Bitcoin in which people are reserved to like some friends in the white paper and they are like oh so does this VC owner stuff like that and then you have like religions while also do the same like they look at these books and they you know they try to make stuff very subjective so we're trying to be like super objective on our values in order to have everyone on the same page and once you have everyone on the same page regarding values is used how do you write to those values and that's ok for for it to be in multiple ways because that's basically thing that's kept it you have to try multiple paths and if you write to it but I think it's very

important to have like a list of values that your community agrees with so Sophie if you think of this on a global perspective right so we have this threat of this surveillance state and it's totalitarian all-powerful governments and now you say okay that the the way against this having communities around values so you think the sort of call to the world is to spend more time figuring out you know what exactly are those values and then building these technology and communities around it or yeah probably if you look at like a society these days it's hard to define values right now or everything that make society how food at all and that's a

tool that this you know this entities use against citizens like you know they are scared by terrorism and other other threats and they are not hopeful anymore and they don't serve the values so we have to make sure that we're not only sipping code but we are doing something meaningful go on so there's there's one blog post that you guys wrote which is sort of you know why what is the big thing Aragon and essentialist governance can solvent and then you tell this story of this fictional person in Venezuela you mind walking through that story I thought it was a nice example of you know kind of the Aragon vision sir so the history talks about a fictional

character core called Maria and Maria is a 16 year old until 16 or 12 something like that well it's just like a super yang Karen in Venezuela who started to code and contribute to open source and she wants to make a living out of it and take her family out of poverty but then she has struggles to do so because there are multiple barriers to that there is a lot of corruption in his home country there is a lot of discrimination of course because she's a women and and see the struggles to do this like the other traditional system there is no ways you can create a company there's a lot of corruption you take months to do so and then she wants to coordinate with some

other open source contributors from another country and it is impossible to do so because the system is architected in a way that you cannot use easily collaborate with her people are in the world and so what she does is just starting like a decentralized organization in a kind of pseudonymous way so no one knows like her gender at all because you know it doesn't matter you are you second theory mattress and see collaborates with with with a co-founder simmer online and the rest are like a small like free software consultancy and they make some money out of it and they make some crypto and eventually is able to take her family out of out of poverty and this is a kind of use case that I would love to see

obviously we are not ready now because we need to make things usable and we need to make sure that you know everything scales and people are usually like able to kind of make use of these products day to day but this is like a use case that we really really feel very very very positive about and I could bring a lot of go to the world so you mentioned before that even even when you are young and there's this European Commission thing and like you know what interested you are Orden about Bitcoin was okay technology and freedom where does this you know obsession of focus on freedom come from from you like when when did that start well the this story about Maria is

actually another fictional it's me I wasn't born in Venezuela but I come from a humble family in Spain and I had a lot of travel starting up and creating something and you know I kind of feel discriminated sometimes because I was not like a like a Stanford or Harvard person I was born in a small village in Spain and an aggressive when I was four years old so there was like a lot of age discrimination back in the day from people from my own country so and also like my family had a lot of trouble with the banks so I think it all comes down to we need to create tools for freedom because freedom can make your life

easier and make you be happier and not work forty years of your life to just you know pay staff to banks and governments and I think that's very powerful and that's very important because we need to live in a world in which humanity matters and we're in addition of animals obey in orders from above well that's very interesting I didn't realize that this is based on you but that makes a lot of sense so the commitment right from the Aragon is to build governance systems it's as write that kind of a line with with its values can you talk about what are you know explicitly the values that shape the earth own project sure so first of all is like freedom or will we fight as sell

sovereignty basically in defiance that you are always you can always make a choice and that choice can be either to participate in systems like you know in existing governance mechanisms or into your organization's or like in the protocols or you know crypto assets or whatever it is that you like or you can exit you can fork it which is one of the principles of like all the blockchain world if you like it good if not you can park it then there is like is a strong focus on privacy which i think is wonderful because it can really erase violence if you focus on privacy so Matt it is still impossible to have violence so we're trying to avoid that at all costs if you

look at a lot of things are happening today they are happening because some entities can actually exercise violence that shouldn't be possible in the first place and that's what also crypto is ringing us and another value is decentralization itself like if you look at governance like even if we build these very cold locking systems there shouldn't be like an address that has control or the parameters of the protocol or you know over the updates of the protocol or even out over the the governance mechanism the protocol uses itself as we totally decentralized so even if it's slower the chains it should be something that you can opt-in and that you reach consensus about then

obviously like we are trying to do something that creates some long term value we're trying to the something that can encourage participants a cannister device participants in the community to actually be rewarded because we believe that values by itself are powerful that you have to you have to feel them in some way separating also Center sort of like long-term economic value is very important and also important is to avoid creating certain profit which is something that people are very worried about in the governance of space like you know you give tokens to your to your community and then devote just like we throw the fans and go away so we have to build systems that actually encourage the creation of long term value versus use like pump and dump schemes and and

finally it's just like making it very very very user friendly embarrassed for users to adopt the systems because otherwise it's gonna be like a crypto elite who benefits about this and it shouldn't be that way it should us be something that is different from everything that we had passed which was like oligarchies and these elites governing everyone so we have to actually make sure this time is different so do you feel like the current efforts of building governance system in the Balkans based feel like genuinely conform to these principles or can you name some specific examples so if you like okay the way they're doing it you know this isn't the way we would do it you know because of

you know one particular value that may not get you know implemented or expressed in that system yeah I think sometimes some of the systems I'm seeing out there like do a staff that is not adequate for that that's a resort to the principle of like opting in for example you have a crypto protocol that is automatically pushing out updates for the like smart contract systems or stuff like that I think that's actually the actually breaks the opt-in value because you're basically changing how the game works or changing how things behave like when you're a little smart contracts is not yes that you are updating your way back up or stuff like that in a server

you are changing the rules of the game you're changing a social contract between multiple parties so something that I would love to see more like opt-in updates in this face and also think there are some protocols that to benefit from like more availability like or governance process like for example Bitcoin it's super super frigid and something like maybe some signaling like you know our stakeholders may want this feature so let's do it yeah so I'm curious here so you mentioned that one of the things that you see issues with is if this is auto upgrade does that apply you know for example Tasers right wants to have that you have got unchained governance and then automatically a protocol gets upgraded or I think poker or like having various projects kind of pursue that direction

so do you think that is not the right direction but or like how do you view that particular issue I think you have to be like a stimuli careful embed neutral like if you push out updates this would be like a long governance process for people to decide if they want to opt out or if they want to opt in like it so we can have an opt-in process so what I really like is like I don't have anything against like for example launching governance or like awareness journal I think it's I mean we're building our ego because we will live in governance but I think you have to just be very very careful because there's a huge difference between pushing out an update and then everyone being automatically updated to a new version and actually say hey

here's a new version do you want to update and then the users say yes I want to update because that's consensus so I think we should try to build systems in which they are fully opt-in and the user is always in control but they would that also mean that you should actually try to build systems that make it easy for change to fork because you know let's say there is a particular upgrade and now 60% of a particular community says we want this I'm on the 40% that don't want it so do you think we should to make it easy for those 40% to go their own way or or is that something that will actually be bad for communities because it will destroy Network effects yeah I don't think a chain 4 means a

community for like I think we're gonna see at some point a fork in a theorem that for example is not a community fork we still have the same developers around the same tools but we serve two different teams and I think that's gonna be wonderful I think right now if it happened right now it would be terrible like I couldn't even no I think we have some like emergency procedures in place in case that happens for the talking and all of that but it would be super bad for a helical system like what are you doing for example dye your dye Forex what happens to your collateral what happens through all of that but right now it would be bad but I think in the in the long term we need to figure out the system so people can exercise exit much more easier this episode of

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or be you know unfair if Bitcoin holders basically control those systems what what's your view on maybe their criticism and the criticisms of on chain conan's in general that's a great question we were at his event that we helped organize in in Toronto called VIP zero which kind of was about you know how do we make sure to document a governance process for theory and like you don't get gather signals from different stakeholders all of what the community wants what the miners want what you wrote it down developers want and stuff like that and and Vlad was there and we talked a lot about how blocks in soupy and and how do you make

sure that people participate and I think on chain governance is a very interesting you know topic but all the other hand a lot of these block teams should be very neutral I really like to quote look from our team who says that you can build democracy on anarchy but you cannot build energy on democracy so basically that means that if you have a very subjective locked-in base you may not be able to do everything whereas in a theorem right now is super neutral you do whatever to one and you have some certainty that you know whatever you do is gonna be ok no one is gonna censor you or forward you away and I think that's a very interesting property of block teams this will be very mutable I'm very neutral

and then you come pick all the staff on layer 2 so that's my kind of a stance on uncheck governance I think it would be cool to have some way for people to signal new updates and the user it could live yeah I'm in or no I want to for work out but it shouldn't be sort of like this very automatic thing or if it is we have to make sure that there is a super long governance process for it to happen because otherwise also you can end up with let bureaucracy and people just you know like two or three doe and holders been able to control the whole thing very very easily ok this is fascinating I did not expect this answer so basically because you are building on chain governance systems right but then your stance is sort of for the actual the layer on which all of those systems

run you know in particularly here iam will be one of them that for that maybe you don't want on chain governance but you would like to have a more anarchic system that's you know very slowly change and not very opinionated but then the dot provides a great sort of ground on which to grow you know opinionated governance decentralized organizations yeah exactly okay great that's very interesting but what about this this general issue of Lock chain governance and plutocracy or blockchain governance in sort of the power off you know the big coin holder

or a big token holder because that will also apply to particular applications that just run Oni theorem even if the underlying layer you know doesn't have coin voting driven governance yeah I think yeah there's the applies for like smart contracts different governments and right now I think the best the best governance mechanisms we have is one talking one vote that may change we may have things that don't require any vote in a role like prediction markets and then you use bet on outcomes and you already put your money where your mouth is which i think is very powerful then you have systems like quadratic Bolton or even if we figure out civil

resistance you may have one person one boat I think until there until we are there I think one person when when talking about vote sorry I think it's a it's a good system in the sense that literally the people that have more stake inside the system get to decide more how it works but we have to make sure there is like a good distribution of tokens and how do you do that that's another thing like I believe a lot of the tokens sales these days are having a lot of whales come in and like eat like 10 percent 20 percent were looking to apply at once and I don't think that's good to start I think if you look at stuff like like Bitcoin and it is pretty centralized but it kind of organically you know centralized so I think we have to make sure that we both favor users in

the beginning and we have so way to like you know mint new tokens and like sort of reward users are being active and participants are been active because that way you both solve the problem of like having a to consider having whales it in and also like stop being centralized over time by the just early adopters and I think the early adopters would be very favored by the system but on the other hand you also want to like you know in Baltimore parties and I think we are like inevitable community I think we have a fear of light inflation and like you know I gotta settle with Bitcoin so I'm kind of fearful of inflation do like yeah about terrible but on the other hand I think it's a very powerful tool if you use it the correct way I mean the question of inequality in

blockchain is interesting right and you know for example in this sovereign individual book one of the things say they talk about is that okay once you have crypto assets then those can't be confiscated or much harder to confiscate and of course one of the the primary entities that confiscate assets today is governance and you know they tax and then they you know use that in in different ways they you know some redistribution is it's a factor though right and genuinely taxation is progressive now we're building with blockchains all kinds of systems right where you have assets that you can't be confiscated which may have lots of great aspects right let's say if you're in Venezuela and and people can protect your asset from a crop government that

seems like probably everyone would agree that's a good thing but at the same time it could also lead her to this aspect that you don't actually have this redistribution anymore from those in the wealthiest to the masses is that something that concerns you do you mean basically the fact that you may not have your distribution to the masses but just like huge inequality this return yeah yeah yeah I think I think that will happen for sure like it's it's like a huge revolution that happened each favoured a new sort of elite in the short term and I think right now it's very clear that that's been the crypto

elite like you know if you are into crypto for more like an idea or take two years and you bought tokens like it probably made a lot of money and I think that's hard to prevent because like the system and every single revolution actually encourages and rewards the early adopters like you know in the blockchain industry like the reward has always been to the first mover where it's another industry is different so I think the best we can do right now is to acknowledge that know that in the certain the blockchain is gonna create a V inequality and it's been accurate like this new crypto elite know it and set systems in place so that doesn't last more than a few years until we are able to teach the

rest of the world how to deliver his technologies because when they learn how to do it there is not gonna be inequality because you know information is gonna be all spread out and everyone will be able to access these tools so we have to focus a lot on user experience and documentation so like you know a couple years from now my mom can come in open aragon and create an organization like like my theory will develop very good to today but do you think that's actually a likely outcome because personally my feeling is that the complexity of this technology in this industry is growing at such a rapid rate that most there's just no way for the mass of the normal person to participate

we've been working on this since like day one just making sure actually like we didn't even start with like you know craziness Marc conference we started with like a mock-up of how the product would be and then like a sort of an interface and then we may still together but we are super UX focused and I think it's a hard task of course that if we base our resources like there's Laura smart people in this space and we can make it possible I think we need so many designers in this place right now oh well let's speak a bit about Aragon sort of as a project and the technology actually actually building can you run this through you know whether some of the main components of Aragon and how do

they work sure so for for the whole architecture we have a few components one of them is basically the smart contract system that makes everything work it's called ariane OS and what aragon OS gives you is up create ability and governance by default so basically by creating a smart contract that is an article app well you get years if you publish a new version of this Marc contract or its front end for example you can automatically like sewage versions so basically you have these voice color proxy so basically you have like this address in aetherium that doesn't change and you can always say hey

is the pokey nap or this is a fine sap and then death proxy basically gets Falls from the outside world and delegates that toward the actual code of the app is so that makes things upgradeable and also that makes possible to have systems that are permissioned in the sames that no missus pry up lock seams permission in the sense that you can have like multiple functionalities in your app and you can only access them if you have permission to do so like for example you can think about a finance app a finance app may have a method to withdraw funds and then you don't want your average user to be able to withdraw funds but you may want your you know boating app or governance mechanism to

be able to move fans around so what you do is instead of hard-coding a governance system that comes with your fans when you do is you say okay I'm gonna motorized this out is the final step I'm gonna give permission to this voting app to withdraw funds from this financier and then I'm gonna have like a token manager app which basically forwards any accident that I took and halters want to this voting app and so I'm a token holder I go to the interface I try to withdraw funds and it tells me hey you cannot do this directly but if you submit a boat into the system and devoting passes you can fulfill your direction your intent to withdraw funds so it's kind of permission escalation in

the in systems like you know in UNIX or Linux so what this makes is you can totally abstract your logic in your app from everything else I do like governance McCann you save your upgrade system and you can focus on building like very small modules that do simple things very well and then linking that with different apps like for example right now in Oregon we have the token manager app which lets you assign a mint tokens we have the Bolton app which is a very simple simple democracy app and then also like the final step which is basically like a boat unless you like we throw you know with different thresholds so you can really get granular and create very complex governance mechanisms and so then is the idea also

that there will be sort of I don't know app store or things where people can build their own extensions and their own versions of these different applications yeah we use release yesterday a developer portal that is hacked at our evil.org and it makes it super super easy to develop apps and a very good like even using the like the governance framework for smart contracts or using also the UI you can either use one or both and it makes it super super is here the idea is that we will not work on creating a lot of features we will just work on like setting this open search thing that you can use this open circuit stack that you can use to create organization with code and then people will create apps to

satisfy their needs now there's also an arrogant network token what's the role of the token yes early the day we were like okay this style thing is cool but in a smart contracts at all but how is this gonna work because you know human server is after like you can encode a lot of things into smart contracts but there are things that are never gonna be able to be written into code probably or even feasible to execute in the theorem virtual machine with all the limitations it has so we are actually conclusion that something like a jurisdiction is a still very needed so if you look at what governments provide you they provide you

security that you know is so when race law you will be able to render them accountable so we're trying to do the same with have been in any sort of like yours easy unlike traditional jurisdiction we're trying to build a new one we're block seen organizations are our native like it's their is their cue stick soon and you can basically create agreements between each party and part of the agreement can be powered by a smart contract like for example if you wanna do payroll the payroll can be executed by a smart contract and there is no possible dispute in that because it's is what it is it is the code and that's it but then you can also find that human readable terms and you can agree to that and those terms can be more subtle like you know you will have

to return your computer once you end up working for the or stuff like that and then you can have a cord who can gather the evidence and get basically the size experiment who's right and they can take your collateral so it's fully like limited liability they cannot go to your home and you know kidnap you because there is no way like it's basically pseudonymous by default and even not in use in the future but they can withdraw your collateral that you define so you always know where you liability and what is your insurance when you interact with all the party so the idea is if I understand this correctly so you'll have various different Aragon organizations and and you know there will be different contracts and and sort of agreements between them some of them you know may

have some ambiguity and then there will be an arbitration system and the idea of the Aragon Network token is that it can be used sort of as a collateral to back these agreements is that correct yeah exactly that's the idea and then also the network itself will have like a constitution which will be very try to be very neutral on theme but like respect things such as human rights and stuff like that and you will be able to also use a token for for governance or how this jurisdiction will work so the one thing that comes to my mind when I hear about this this court system so let's say I run a company or this aergon

organization I'm gonna have various contracts with different parties now to collateralize all of I mean if you look at the real the real economy that people enter all kinds of contracts but they don't generally put up collateral you know that will then be available if some party defaults or misbehaves now if you have to do that you know for all kinds of contracts you have to put on chain collateral back that seems like an extremely expensive process yeah I think it is a problem that all sort of stake in systems have and we're trying to do is we're trying to engineer it in a way that you can just put like a collateral

for multiple agreements but of course even if you do that there may be people that can't go agreements because they'll have collateral so I think this kind of common to all like you know second systems and I'm very excited about fair like loans there are total Pro is working on that like like Dharma or bloom and and I think it's ubi super important for us we need to figure out how that works because I mean it's taking is wonderful but on the other hand we have to make sure that people kind of take it the first place to participate to the marketplace so yeah something that we are we're looking at but I think we should I fury other side acai industry yeah no I I agree

so that that would be very interesting system to emerge so down the line right at some day maybe you can just have this awnsering governance organization and you know purely in crypto and interacting with all the cryptic companies but today most companies will still need to have even if their crypto focus right they'll need to have some interaction with you know non crypto entities or they may actually need a legal entity in particular country so how how is Aragon gonna integrate with that are you also building tools to enable that we are exactly building the torus ourselves but what we are doing is we have this grants program which is

primarily for technical implementation research but we're also trying to fund legal research like there are some countries and jurisdictions and lawyers we're trying to see how to make the AOS like recognized as legal entities in different countries so we're trying to fund that research you can save a little at some point there will be like templates that you can use like right now in Aragon when you create a like an organization you have like some templates you can use like right now we have a token project with democracy token Pro it with a multi-sig but you may also have like I don't know like LLC startup or stuff like that which automatically like you know gets all the info for the blockchain and creates like

all the PDFs for lawyers to use file their staff something that we are not doing ourselves but it's definitely doable but really also and we're trying to talk with Revelator's here and there to figure out how open they are and some countries are very very open to this concept like Switzerland for example like India super open to the concept of you know let's make that was something that can interact with the traditional world well I think that does lead us to come another interesting topic which is sort of the state of Aragon as an organization overall and in particularly you guys move to to to recently can you talk a little bit about like what drove that decision and what is the organizational structure of Aragon today

so right now we have this foundation in Estonia and we're trying to transition that West who is sort of nonprofit so the idea since the beginning was to split off like the entity that is the nonprofit and is basically maintaining the project until we can fully decentralize it because the idea is that the article network will be the one that decides the future of the project in the community they our community will be able to basically directly control its future but until we are there because obviously would you be centralized organizations to work before making that possible so before we are there we have like this nonprofit entity which is the legal entity responsible of the other project and then we use a split off a different

entity which is a company and these for-profit company is just the first team that was employed by the foundation but now it's a different entity there is from why we are trying to do this a split a very clear split it's because we want more teams to work in the project and the idea is that the foundation will give grants to these different teams both in ether and AMT and this prize will have like these teams will have a very strong commitment to the network and to the project and you know the idea that we're not only gonna be the only like team working on Aragon but many other teams and this decentralize development what we're trying to think about the the best factor like what happens if we get hit by a bus like all of us at once and one of the goals we

have this year is that and another year if that happens is like the parade would be okay because we have contributors we have other teams working on it so that's the idea that we have and Switzerland has been like an extremely welcoming place to have the legal entity and we have like a very close connection with the with the government here they speak crypto like everyone here is a scripta which is unbelievable and something that I like about the the website of sook is that they say that tax payers are considered as clients and not DEP doors and that's something that I feel is served yeah yeah no it's free I mean I'm from Switzerland earth lane and and I agree that there's a they'd see there's like a

healthier relationship between citizens and government and in many other many other countries yeah so how far are you along there is is currently you know for example if if there's a the Foundation Board of the Swiss foundation this is still controlled by you know you guys who the same people running Aragon one or do you already have you managed to kind of get a broader community control of the foundation or and how is the process coming along with having other companies also being contractors to the foundation yeah right now we are sort of like starting to split so at the end

like right now the headless foundation on the head of life are a big one which is the first development company working on ameri-ghen is the same so in the end is kind of the same I will try to figure out how to like what were the next steps we are talking to a couple teams that are very interested in being American team teams that are part of the office space and they are very well known and that's really great I think we have all the right things in place we just need to like ordinate to make sure that communication works because I mean with you have like three or four teams you have to properly communicate to everyone and serve the roadmap and sort of work together not to implement the same stuff

and I don't think this is having this having done a lot of times before so we are trying to be is very very careful and both very very slow in this process um the next thing that I would love to see from the foundation point of view is that we started giving token holders control over some part of the fans and also something that we want to do in disorder is release a signaling app so auntie holders can use signal their intent and like basically say hey I want to propose this thing to the IMT holidays every with it or not and that's not gonna be binded by itself but it's gonna create pressure like if talking holders want the foundation to do something and they do a signal important and it has like 90 percent support then

that's a lot of pressure so we're trying to take it a step a step and also to get the community on how to do governance because that's something that is super important to do in the surger because these centralized programs is such a new thing Oh fantastic so what are some of the the community initiatives that are you know that exist today so we had a couple proposals when actually by others when they sound different if your foundation about our record system like something like technical then there is a proposal more about like fans and how so we manage the fans and but right now we don't have any signaling mechanism in places like if have repo in which people

can like submit their proposals um but with this signal in mechanism we want people to like is basically it make a lot of different apostles because I one kid now is been like I did have repo and it's been like I don't know like ten proposals or so but very very technical and very like product oriented but we want to see more like sort of mission oriented proposals and a strategy sort of proposals so I think that's what the signalling app will give us when we release it to the main net oh that sounds great well and what about the roadmap so what's coming up for Eragon in the next six months to a few years well in this order I can say that we are we're close to maintenance

very close and also we're close as I said to release in a empty signaling and that's a very important step to likely centralize the governance of the project we are close to also boarding more teams to like reduce the device factor and make sure that wherever it happens the Despres maybe okay from the product perspective we want to make sure we properly document everything because we have so much technology that we have created that no one knows about it because we have done a very poor job of communicating that so we just release the developer portal haggled I own that org and we want to keep sort of documenting stuff like we have like a package manager as I said before which handles the smart contracts and fronting updates

automatically we have a way to describe aetherium sessions in a human readable way so we want to like motorize this component series more document them and gives no way to the community and even give grants to be both to maintain them because that's something that we want to do more and more like giving grants we use announce the first batch of our grants program and we will try to get like five projects with brands each quarter or so and we will try to continue that and also working on the article network like after Eragon is on the mainland and it's working we want to focus on releasing the network something this year like some early version and also we are listening as a conversion of

the white paper which is way way way better than the first version in the upcoming weeks cool fantastic sign so if people want to get involved what's what's the best way to start participating and contributing to Eragon we have Aragon de chat in which you can jump in and chat with everywhere in the community also our github organization which is just Aragon and if you are developer you can go to hack the iGoogle org and you know basically start hacking oh well thanks so much Louis it was super interesting to learn a bit more about Aragon and I think this decentralized governance spaces for sure one of the most exciting things to come

out of all of this blocks and revolution so I mean I can't wait to see you know actual organizations being run on Aragon absolutely I can't wait either and thanks for having me cool and thanks so much for a listener for once again adjoining so we put out new episodes of epicenter every week you can get the podcast the audio content any podcast application on iTunes or you can get the video also on youtube.com slash episode of Bitcoin if you want to support the show you can leave us an iTunes review that helps new people find the show or you can also leave us the nation and the tape address are in the show notes thanks so much and report being back next

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