5. Decentralized Organizations

Bitcoin can be thought of as the first prototypical Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO). It created a network-based ecosystem of participants who contribute computational power toward a singular goal. In Bitcoin, the underlying protocol created a financial service that rewards miners for providing verification services, and this setup became a rudimentary decentralized organization. In this chapter, we will focus on more-complex organizations created on the blockchain with Aragon. Aragon is a decentralized application (DApp) that lets anyone create and manage different kinds of organizations (NGOs, non-profits, foundations) on the Ethereum blockchain. In the early days of Ethereum, creating a DAO and implementing even the most basic functions required complicated smart contracts and Solidity code. Aragon has simplified this process. It implements the basic features of an organization in a base template that gets deployed whenever a user instantiates a company. Most of the traditional features such as a cap table, voting abilities, fundraising, and accounting are offered in the Aragon template as a decentralized counterpart running on the blockchain. In addition, an Aragon company can be customized in a very granular fashion and extended with new modules that can be added to a company’s existing smart contracts. Aragon enables different organizations to control the level of trust built into them.