Aragon's Rise and Fall: Another Example of Decentralization Theater?

Automatic TRANSCRIPT

Going to start off with a fresh piece from Danny, Danny, what's up? Yes. So the last week I've been following the rise and fall of an effort to by activist investors to take over part of the Aragon treasury Aragon is a long-standing crypto project that focuses on building tools for daos in it itself was moving toward becoming a Dao by moving control of its treasury to its community. Not the community was really full of lots of activist investors who wanted changes at Aragon and they started making noise about pursuing those changes, including with an investment fund behind them called arca. Well, Aragon didn't like that so much and decided basically to get rid of its governance and to move the Dow from a Dow that controls the organization into a grant making doubt. So this is really a story about decentralization theater. It also will, as I think you noted on Twitter, it's another example of time being a flat circle. It really is Danny. So back in 2021, I'm looking at the piece right now, actually. I reported on a very similar subject with Aragon. It was Aragon association the air gun Dao, Aragon one of was one of the names of the entities. And they had a bunch of resignations believe about 12 staffers left those two entities due to a lack of financial transparency, a cofounder was also essentially forced out at the time. There was a lot of disruption, a lot of people thought that air guide itself was going to shut down. It looked like they were probably just going to sell off the IP to their voting software and the governance platforms they've been building. For those who don't follow air God, it has been around for quite a while. I think most people who have been having a good fingerprint of space for wild know about Eric on, not necessarily like a top project, but definitely a project that people are familiar with has stuck around and has been developing some important governance schemes for daos. But it's been hit twice now with problems that we see over and over again with Dallas, which is some people have power, some people don't. There's money involved. You can't trust everybody. And at the end of the day, someone has to write the checks and things start to fall apart.

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