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Category: Decentralization
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The decentralized governance protocol has seen 13 resignations among related staff over the course of the last week.
It’s been a rough week for the Aragon governance platform where philosophical differences have brought about a long list of resignations.
Aragon co-founder Jorge Izquierdo announced on Jan. 11 he would no longer be working as CEO of the for-profit Aragon One, a company dedicated to building tools and services related to Aragon.
Aragon is an Ethereum-based platform involved with decentralized governance.
The announcement took place just hours after news broke that Aragon had purchased Dvote Labs, the company behind blockchain voting protocol Vocdoni.
Today I resigned as Aragon One's CEO.
— Jorge Izquierdo (@izqui9) January 11, 2021
Leading this team has been the privilege and adventure of a lifetime and I am immensely proud of what we achieved.
I feel quite sad that it's come to this, but given circumstances following, I don't think I can keep doing a good job.
Izquierdo cited his differences with decisions being made by the project’s governing body, the Aragon Association, as his reason to exit the project, which he had been a part of since 2015.
Sorry to hear it Jorge. Unfortunately another example of a governance startup with dysfunctional governance. Yes I'm subtweeting essentially the entire DAO sector.
— Richard D. Bartlett (@RichDecibels) January 13, 2021
One week prior to Izquierdo’s departure, Aragon Association Head of Governance John Light announced his resignation, stating he felt that the project no longer reflected his values or that of the original Aragon Manifesto.
In order to increase transparency and improve as an organization, Light suggested that association members “publish all meeting minutes and financials for public review” going forward.
Inspired by Light’s actions and agreeing with the sentiments put forth in his letter, 11 employees of Aragon One quit the company over the following few days, tendering their resignations publicly on the project’s official Discord channel.
After questions were raised about a December transfer of 52,000 ETH from the Aragon treasury in the project’s Discord chat, Aragon Association Head of Operations Joe Chatsworth stepped in to provide an explanation to address fears that the project was losing its transparency. According to Chatsworth, the ETH was sold to help “ensure sufficient runway in stable assets to weather any significant market downturns.”
Though insiders remain quiet on the subject, Izquierdo and Light have given subtle hints that indicating they believe Aragon is becoming too centralized. In Izquierdo’s last letter to the Aragon Association, he referenced the debate currently playing out over big tech censorship, and likened maintenance of internet neutrality to a great struggle:
“I believe that stopping the trend of important Internet infrastructure being owned by a few corporations to be the fight of our generation, akin to last century’s fight to eradicate fascism from Europe.”
In October, co-founder Luis Cuende made the case to Cointelegraph that Aragon could potentially be used to resolve social media moderation problems, as it provides a framework for a virtual court where contestants stake crypto to make a claim that is judged by a decentralized jury.
The May 2018 token sale for Aragon famously raised $25 million in ETH in 26 minutes, which at the time was the fourth largest crowd-funded event in history. According to stats trackers at DeepDAO, seven of the top 10 biggest DAOs by USD value use Aragon as their platform. The Aragon platform also powers popular DeFi projects like AAVE, Curve, and mStable.
The price of ANT, the Aragon Network Token, is down 8% over the last seven days.
Social media users are leaving traditional providers in droves in favor of more independent platforms over fears of unwarranted data collection, censorship, and refusal of service.
A change to WhatsApp’s terms of service has triggered a mass exodus from the messaging platform to more private and independent rivals like Telegram and Signal, which have registered millions of new users over the last week.
Rather than agreeing to new terms specifying the app’s right to share user data with Facebook, millions of WhatsApp users simply gave up using the platform, abandoning it for less-intrusive competitors. Telegram alone has been downloaded 25 million times in the last 72 hours.
Telegram surpassed 500 million active users. 25 million new users joined in the last 72 hours: 38% came from Asia, 27% from Europe, 21% from Latin America and 8% from MENA. https://t.co/1LptHZb9PQ
— Telegram Messenger (@telegram) January 12, 2021
Some of those new sign-ups include refugees from the free speech platform Parler, looking for a way to connect and organize after the right-wing Twitter alternative was suddenly yanked offline by hosting services provider Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Many people on Parler joined Telegram when it started getting banned by Apple and others.
— Yashar Ali (@yashar) January 12, 2021
Not saying that accounts for the 25 million but there was certainly a big shift over to Telegram. https://t.co/Taxow05M9W
The ability of web hosting giants like AWS to unilaterally close down sites and infrastructure has some in the cryptocurrency industry worried for the future health of blockchain-related projects.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin described Parler’s takedown as “very worrying” in a series of tweets, noting that AWS was much more of a “common infrastructure provider” than a social media site. Buterin also expressed a certain level of dismay over Twitter’s decision to permanently ban President Donald Trump from its platform:
“The fact that so many people who would normally never support such corporate power are now cheering tech CEOs running roughshod over democratically elected officials deserves some introspection…”
Take Infura and AWS offline and see how decentralized ETH is.
— Stephen Cole (@sthenc) January 12, 2021
In the past, estimates have suggested that around 60% of Ethereum nodes run on AWS.
EOS and Bitshares co-founder Daniel Larimer recently called for the mass abandonment of big social media platforms prior to the takedown of Parler. He correctly predicted that it may have been the “last chance” to download certain social media apps. Larimer recently quit his position as CTO at EOSIO developers block.one, vowing to work on censorship-resistant platforms which he believes will become increasingly important as more people find themselves banned or suspended from traditional platforms.
Other crypto projects are wary of the centralized nature of tech giants like Amazon and anticipate problems relying upon them. The decentralized liquidity network THORChain, for example, incentivizes nodes running its software to avoid AWS by awarding them extra perks for using alternative service providers.
Thorchain continues to decentralize.
— Sage⚡ (@Bitcoin_Sage) January 12, 2021
Thornodes are incentivized not to run on AWS, due to concerns about centralization.
250 $RUNE this week. Rewards increase with an additional 250 RUNE per week until AWS THORNodes are below 33% of the network. pic.twitter.com/4OG88Ao22s
Decentralized solutions providers, like domain name server Handshake, are censorship-resistant in that they avoid reliance on classical processes for domain name resolution. Pirate academic journal archivists Sci-Hub switched DNS providers using Handshake, as mentioned by Buterin.
For now. But this will be a boon for the open web, decentralized tools and networks. Short-term concentration will lead to long-term diffusion. Antifragility isn't free. https://t.co/f0u6Ln3XXj
— Jonny (@wysinati) January 9, 2021
Censorship concerns aren’t the only reason why reliance on a single hosting service provider poses risks to crypto-based services. In November, AWS outages affected Coinbase, causing users to have problems logging in to and navigating their accounts.
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