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 contributed computational power toward a singular goal. In Bitcoin, the distributed protocol providing a financial service and rewarding miners became a rudimentary decentralized organization. In this chapter, we talk about more complex and full DAOs made in Aragon. Aragon (https://aragon.one/) is a decentralized application (DApp) that lets anyone create and manage different kinds of organizations (nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], nonprofits, foundations) on the Ethereum blockchain. Creating a DAO requires numerous steps and originally it was more difficult to implement in Ethereum. However, Aragon implements all the basic features of an organization in a base template that is deployed whenever a user instantiates a company. Most of the traditional features such as a cap table, voting, fundraising, and accounting are offered in Aragon as a decentralized counterpart to run on the blockchain. In addition, an Aragon company can be customized to a very granular extent and extended using new modules that can be added to a company’s existing smart contracts. Aragon enables different organizations to be built on the blockchain, and one interesting use case integrates identity using a two-way verification scheme with Keybase. We talk about how the Keybase to Aragon peg functions to provide identity services in the context of a decentralized system. We also briefly go over the Aragon kernel, which is essentially a task manager with subroutines that ensure smooth communication within an organization, among its members, and in the underlying blockchain.