Dweb: Creating Decentralized Organizations with Aragon

In the Dweb series, we have been covering projects that explore what exactly is possible when the web becomes decentralized or distributed. These projects aren’ t affiliated with Mozilla, and some of these rewrite the rules of how we think in regards to a web browser. What they have in common: These types of projects are open source plus open for participation, and they talk about Mozilla’ s mission to keep the internet open and accessible for all.

While many from the projects we’ ve covered develop the web as we know it or work like the browsers we’ re acquainted with, the Aragon project has a wider vision: Give people the tools to construct their own autonomous organizations with interpersonal mores codified in smart agreements. I hope you enjoy this introduction to Aragon from project co-founder Luis Cuende.

– Dietrich Ayala

Introducing Aragon

I’ m Luis. I cofounded Aragon , which allows for the development of decentralized organizations. The concepts of Aragon are embodied within the Aragon Manifesto , and its file format was inspired by the Mozilla Manifesto!

Here’ ersus a quick summary.

• We are in a key moment of all time: Technology either oppresses or liberates us.
• That outcome will depend on common goods being ruled by the community , and not just country states or corporate conglomerates.
• For that to happen, we need technologies that allows for decentralized governance .
• Because of crypto, decentralized governance can provide brand new means of organization that don’ t entail violence or even surveillance , therefore providing a lot more freedom to the individual and increasing fairness .

With Aragon, developers can make new apps, such as voting systems, that use smart contracts to influence decentralized governance and allow peers to manage resources like funds, membership, plus code repos.

Aragon is built on Ethereum, which is a blockchain for clever contracts. Smart agreements are software that is executed in the trust-less and transparent way, without needing to rely on a third-party server or any type of single point of failure.

Aragon is at the intersection of social, app platform, plus blockchain.

Architecture

The Aragon app any of few truly decentralized applications. Its smart contracts and front are upgrade-able thanks to aragonOS and Aragon Package Supervisor (APM) . You can think of APM like a fully decentralized and community-governed NPM. The smart contracts live on the Ethereum blockchain, and APM takes care of keeping a log of their versions. APM also keeps a record of arbitrary information blobs hosted on decentralized storage space platforms like IPFS, which in our own case we use for keeping the front end for the apps.

The Aragon app allows customers to install new apps into their business, and those apps are embedded making use of sandboxed iframes. All the apps make use of Aragon UI , therefore customers don’ t even know they may be interacting with apps made by different programmers. Aragon has a very rich authorization system that allows customers to set what each app can perform inside their organization. An example would be: As much as $1 can be withdrawn from the money if there’ s an election with 51% support.

Hello World

To create an Aragon application, you can go to the Aragon Developer website . Getting started is very easy.

First, install IPFS if you don’ t get it already installed.

2nd, run the following commands:

  $ npm we -g @aragon/cli
$ aragon init foo. aragonpm. eth
$ compact disc foo
$ aragon run
 
 

Here we will show a counter app, which allows members of the organization to count up or lower if a democratic vote happens, one example is.

This would be the smart agreement (in Solidity ) that will keeps track of the counter in Ethereum:

  agreement Counter is AragonApp 
/**
* @notice Increment the counter by 1
*/
function increment() auth(INCREMENT_ROLE) external 
// ...


/**
* @notice Decrement the counter by 1
*/
function decrement() auth(DECREMENT_ROLE) external 
// ...


 
 

This code operates in a web worker , monitoring events in the smart contract plus caching the state in the background:

 // app/script. js
import Aragon from '@aragon/client'

// Initialize the app
const app = new Aragon()

// Listen for events and reduce these to a state
const state$ = application. store((state, event) => 
// Initial state
if (state === null) state = 0

// Build state
switch (event.event) 
case 'Decrement':
state--
break
case 'Increment':
state++
break


return state
 )
 
 

Some simple HTML (not using Aragon URINARY INCONTINENCE, for simplicity):

 <! -- app/index. code! -->
<! doctype html>

< button id="decrement"> -< /button>
< div id="view">... < /div>
< button id="increment"> +< /button>
< script src="app. js"> < /script>
 
 

And the JavaScript that updates the UI:

 // app/app. js
import Aragon,  providers  through '@aragon/client'

const app = brand new Aragon(
new providers. WindowMessage(window. parent)
)
const view = record. getElementById('view')

app. state(). subscribe(
function(state) 
view.innerHTML = `The counter is $`
,
function(err) 
view.innerHTML = 'An error occurred, check the console'
console.log(err)

)
 
 

aragon operate takes care of updating your own app on APM and posting your local webapp to IPFS, so that you don’ t need to worry about it!

Learn More

You can find Aragon’ s website or the Developer Portal to learn more about Aragon. If you are thinking about decentralized governance, you can also check out the research community forum .

If you would like in order to contribute, you can look at our good very first issues .

When you have any questions, please join the particular Aragon community chat !

Luis is CEO of Aragon One, one of the teams working on the particular Aragon project. Luis was granted as the best underage European developer at the age of 15 and has been classified by Forbes 30 Under 30 and MIT TR35 . He cofounded the blockchain startup Stampery and has been into crypto given that 2011. His first open resource project was a Linux distribution centered on UX.

More articles by Luis Cuende…

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