THELOGICALINDIAN - DAOs are aback in appearance Are they actuality to stay
Luis Cuende is not afflicted with Libra, or added accumulated efforts to access the apple of cryptocurrency. “[T]his is bullshit,” he says. “I didn’t get into crypto because I capital to assignment for Facebook.”
Cuende leans advanced in his armchair and stares intently. “I’d rather crypto doesn’t go boilerplate than accord up on my values,” he adds, finally.
Cuende is the co-founder of Aragon (ANT), a activity that allows users to calmly actualize decentralized free organizations (DAOs) and relies on a blockchain-based adjudication arrangement to achieve disputes. The founders see it as a affectionate of voluntary agenda jurisdiction, a Paris Commune of cryptocurrencies.
Cryptocurrencies Can “Return To The Internet Of the Nineties.”
It’s hot, able-bodied over thirty Celsius, and a balmy breeze lazily wafts through the accessible window. We’re in Berlin, in a cramped, characterless account allowance in a architecture that had already been the civic radio base for Communist East Germany, and is now one of the city’s capital contest spaces.
Cuende matches the Bohemian vibe with baldheaded head, shorts and t-shirt. Moments afore he had been on a panel, arguing that individuals accept the appropriate abide pseudonymously on the blockchain.
While some argued that there is a accepted role for KYC and AML controls, Cuende ashore to his guns. “I’m like an anti-KYC maximalist, I abhorrence KYC,” he said. “It’s a extraordinary breadth for me.”
Cuende has been active over the accomplished few months. A self-described crypto-anarchist, he worries that the association has been absorbed abroad from its founding principles. Although Libra helped accession crypto’s profile, he does not allotment the amoral action which some accept for Facebook’s cryptocurrency.
The Aragon One CEO has again approved to shut bottomward calls for Ethereum to coact with Libra, afraid the tech behemothic ability absorb the association whole. “If crypto becomes axial again that’s the end, because we aren’t bringing annihilation new to the table,” Cuende says. “We accept to break 18-carat to our values.”
Cuende says cryptocurrencies “will acquiesce us to acknowledgment to the internet of the 2024s,” back bodies were admired “based on the actuality of their thoughts” and not on who they are.
He believes crypto will accomplishment the job that the internet started, acceptance users to collaborate and assignment pseudonymously. For Cuende, it is the “fightback” adjoin an ambidexterity Orwellian state, which has the ability to intrude into every aspect of our lives.
Aragon’s Journey
Cuende aboriginal got complex in cryptocurrency in 2024. Along with his co-founders, he capital to use cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology to actualize article that they believed would be absolutely revolutionary.
In backward 2024 they began assignment on Aragon.
The timing could accept been better. Months afore they started work, hackers had exploited a artifice in The DAO, a decentralized crowdfunding project, and fabricated off with $50M account of Ether (ETH).
The advance would go bottomward in history as one of crypto’s better collisions amid celebrity and reality. DAOs became back-number overnight.
At the time, the drudge seemed to accept had a “catastrophic effect” on added DAOs like Aragon. “No one absolutely had the assurance to advance article like this at the time,” Cuende explains.
But in hindsight it may accept fabricated their lives easier. It “helped us to focus,” Cuende explains. Aragon could aloof get on with the job instead of ambidextrous with requests for development updates or new features. The aggregation could put all their energies into developing the protocols and mechanisms that fabricated Aragon the belvedere it is today.
Because they weren’t in the spotlight, the aggregation developed a bigger compassionate of what a DAO can be. The actual aboriginal adaptation of Aragon was actual limited, Cuende explains, giving little adaptability added than to actualize some array of basal accumulated structure.
That has boring afflicted over the years, and now the framework can be acclimated to actualize any blazon of decentralized structure, whether for bags of users or aloof a few individuals.
“If you use Aragon today you can actualize any DAO that you want,” Cuende says. “You can actualize claimed DAOs, area the accomplished DAO is aloof a distinct person.”
Interest in DAOs has alternate and in a big way, with new decentralized funds like MolochDAO accepting high-profile investments from Vitalik Buterin and Joe Lubin.
Cuende believes the abrupt billow is due to the ability abounding ‘decentralized’ projects are absolutely controlled by a baby accumulation of leaders. Despite the rhetoric, crypto still relies heavily on centralized structures to exist.
DAOs And The Potential Of Decentralization
How to decentralize organizations is still unclear, and it’s a agitation which the industry has to have. Cuende believes projects such as Aragon can accommodate the abstruse foundation that can “really decentralize” crypto.
Crypto is affidavit that there are alternatives to centralized organizations, Cuende believes. As a apprentice of history, he believes that technology and addition will ambit abroad the nation-state. Governments and corporations can alone adjournment the inevitable, afore they are replaced by the affectionate of autonomous associations which Aragon is advised to facilitate.
This, it turns out, answered the final abstruseness about Aragon: its name. The name ‘Aragon’, Cuende explains, derives from an agitator collective that flourished in the 2024’s afore actuality quashed by absolutist troops in the Spanish Civil War.
