True Decentralization by Luis Cuende

cool very nice so thank you everyone for being here and all the ether link roof for pulling this together so I'm Lewis I'm co-founder of Aragon and also CEO of our long Wang which is one of the teams working on on the Aragon project but I'm not here today to talk about Aragon itself there is some content about our developer tools and what's happened during this couple of days but I'm here to talk about through the centralization and what it means to create a true decentralized entity and the risks we face right now if we don't adhere to these you know radical decentralization so we are at the stage in which it is very clear that cryptic will become the next a basement so we have sort of trends we have you know crypt is very hard to use for people it's very abstract like it's not like in the 90s when like internet you know what's creative what was really poor but like when it become more more mainstream people started to use it that was you know it kind of changed technology but now we are changing technology and societal aspects we're changing how people organize when changing how how people you know leave in their day to day basis and this really abstract for people to tell them you know you know politics is broken we will use this da yo that people can use to get together and act and like you know like see resources and all of that that's really hard to tell people or for example your identity is not the identity that you know the government gives you there is a staff that you know it doesn't have to be away but it's been that way for a lot of years and so people are just like it doesn't we break the mental frameworks and then it's very abandoned capital wise which is kind of a problem also because the incentives are are kind of up right now get on SEO you know you raise a hundred million dollars what do you do well you kind of really something half-baked and then you become a VC or whatever and that's it and that's not how to work right with founders of you know Pro yes there are some VCS and our service unary so we have all the right ingredients for crypto to be the next how this meant to create a lot of you know a lot of different classes like the crypto Illuminati or the Crypt elite who know how to use all these tools who know how to you know sort of engage with people so they seem like missionaries and like you know emission technologists and then they raise four billion dollars and they use the money to like bribe universities or whatever if you know what I'm talking about and that use creates a new elite right that doesn't help create the world that we are all trying to create here which is more fair which is more free so what can we do here we have two different kind of decisions to take one is ideological and I will go over what I don't like all decisions we can take to Boyd this and also other ones are technical if we think about you know how we use the computers these days a lot of technical decisions were made for us decades ago with Microsoft and Apple in other companies and they were technical decisions but these technical decisions have very deep implications so we have to be very conscious about that so I will get us started with the first chapter which is a logical decisions so what are the decisions that we have to take from my ideology point of view so crypto actually becomes what we wanted to become so first one is radical transparency today we have you know projects raising large amounts of money and then the money we don't really know if you know people are gonna use it to buy Lambos or to go live in an island for the rest of their lives you can kind of know by looking at that you have you have a stack of data for like three months maybe you know gas bath and you will be correct if they are working a lot you kind of know that they are doing right of stuff but anyway this wouldn't be the case we su don't have to look for any signals this would be the teams that are actually transparent and they push the limits for transparency because at the end they have a duty with their community and so I want to share some stuff that that we are trying to do in that direction so for example transparency of funds and how we spend funds so if you go to transparency dot Aragon org you will see how we spend each scent that we raise in the token sale so for example here Alexa who is our ops person has done an amazing job documenting every single expense there so you can see you know like for example for our Grants Program what is the money that we're giving to each of the grantees you can click there it takes you to the transaction on the theorem blockchain that says you know how how much it was worth in Fiat at the time we made a payment and how much is it worth now how much ether was it or any token you can see even for like you know meetups like a New York meet up with you or like a hackathon venue we paid for you can go there and see how we spend money and either for payroll and stuff like that you can go and see how we like spend on paying all people during a month or stuff like that so I think that's very important because at the end we have this duty with our community in that we cannot forget about then also is not only about fans but like where are you building are you working on something are you used like you know buying Lambos and going off islands all day and the answer to that I believe is also transparency of work so we have this channel in our rocket shell which is like the public chat we use for Aragon its Aragon dot chat and it's called check-in and every week if you are a community member or you are a core developer or a core contributor you can go there and these three to five items you have worked on during that week for the project so stuff that you have contributed and again is not used for like core team members of any Aragon team it's for any contributor really so you may go there and if you do pull requests you may go there and put it there so the community knows that you have contributed and it is super cool because each week like we do this each week and you can see what's going on each week in a very simple way you don't have to guess right we just tell you then the next one I think is the centralized token supply like I am I am not happy with how token sales are turned in this year and for the later part of last year as well like early on there was this you know in Bitcoin back in the day goes I mean to VidCon before going into aetherium and this was his concept of pre mine and people were very averse to pre mines so pre mind man that if you release a coin or a token and you retain some for years people were really criticizing you because they said you know is that fair look at Satoshi for example obviously that's kind of an extreme right so those is kind of an extreme and also that was he kept a lot of coins for himself right not for any legal entity but for himself and there is there is a lot of power into foundations or legal entities retaining some part of the tokens so they can work and pay salaries and you know hire people but what is not okay is like you know if you're trying to create a decent rest project and you won't like you know more than 50% of the tokens is it really decentralized and I've seen a lot of that today with a lot of half token sales have done these days that you say like you know 3% Dawkins or whatever and I mean depends on the token but like for tokens that you wanna that they are purely like cryptographic assets in the future will be able to be used by the community for governance for example that's a bad start because people who have more governance power than just like you know whatever small percentage then another core critical error that we are doing these days is not high multiple teams so for example if you look at a theorem the theorem has a theorem Foundation which is a centralized team like is the money is the prick that raised the money as a legal and it raised the money back in the day and it's legal responsible for the project but then something interesting happened and it was parity so at some point the parity team forked of the ethereal foundation and right now that's awesome because we have this healthy you know competition between the two teams implementing different stuff and I believe that's key because at the end if we are working on you know creating decentralized projects what is the point if use one single team has all the development power right the same way that gives one legal entity having the majority of the tokens you know if you have one entity that is used hiring and employing every single developer working on the protocol and you know sometimes they decide to change paths or they decide to fire people or they disappear for example then it's gone like you don't have that project more so it's open source that helps of course but if we want to go the decentralize route wanting to have multiple teams and it is the case for example of a bit clear as well right Bitcoin has different companies obviously like some of them are more important than others like development wise women have the case of block stream for example but overall we have multiple teams working on it and there is something we've been trying to replicate we still have the Aragon foundation there but we are trying to basically fire everyone from the Aragon from this soon and move them into separate teams and the cool thing about this is you may have teams that are opinionated so here we have two teams one is Aragon one which is the one that for Jaime are living and then you have the Aragon DAC which is a completely different one led by the guys that giveth that some of you may may know and the cool thing is we are so different like Aragon one is like a super small team super like you know high bandwidth and super close as well and then you have the Aragon the ACO which is more like a fluid entity like any contributor may go there and collaborate and be part of a team very easily get a basic income for contributing to Aragon and this is super cool because we are you would have different paths or after the single we are all going around you know let's make Aragon great but then we have different ways of arriving there different organization methods and that's that's fantastic that's beautiful and then even if are going once it's down or the DSA shuts down the project is able to continue and I think that's very important for the centralizing projects then what this allows is very interesting after having these you may basically wind down your central legal entity or your foundation or the company that did a talk and sale or something like that you can do that because development which is where it's important it's with done in the in you know independent teams that you are funding from these entities so you have what we're trying to do now is we're trying to have the foundation like a minimum viable foundation that use like you know employees very few people and just focuses on giving grants to teams so to these teams here for example by in the future more teams that apply or in general the contributors that when I part of the are conical system and the foundation will eventually like basically you know spend they're its fans on different teams and found in teams and infrastructure and three runs out of funds and that includes basically giving the money away to the Aragon Network which is the DA yo that is going to represent the legal entity but before making sure that like a DA yo or a decentralized organization can be the one carrying the torch you have to make sure that you know the foundation for example doesn't play people sister it's kind of abstract in a way you know who drives the project until you're able to fully decentralize it which is the foundation from the actual development teams that are working on the implementation and then technical decisions which is a very interesting part so as I was talking about our plan is to give back or give away all the funds the foundation raised to a dealio that will be the Aragon Network that will be the dealio basically carrying the torch after the foundation winds down and so the idea here is so we raise like about twenty five million dollars at the time which was worth like around 400 million dollars in January now like it's like 80 because you know crypto life but the idea is that like after spending money to fund in these teams I was talking about and other contributors we eventually are able to transition the fans to a yo-yo to have the community govern them so the idea is you can just started out and I start experimenting and the cool thing is you can put you know 100k see how it goes you can put a million dollars see how it goes you can put ten and then it's obviously a risk right because it's I mean like in our case we are heavily bearing on decentralized governance because that's what Aragon is doing basically but still you can do things like for example reteam veto power for a period of time so something that we're trying to do right now is we're trying to see how we can slowly move from this centralized model of a foundation to totally be centralized one so for example the first step we want to do is we want to have the foundation making proposals to the Dorgan holders and be like hey I want to spend a million dollars this year on grants to aetherium projects and then token holder scum Vito a decision can say hey I don't like it please don't do that or they can approve it which basically means not doing Vito nor exercise in the veto power and that does not give full control to token holders of the project yet by the first step and you can educate them and you can see how they do governance in a decentralized manner until you are able to you know start decentralize you more and more until you know the foundation doesn't do really anything you've stock and holders controlling the funds directly on the blockchain also go burned upgrade ability upgrade ability has been a very hot topic ever since the DAO hack it's very obvious that availability is very good for smart contracts because otherwise like you stick with the back forever and or you can add new features the smart contract or stuff like that and not only for the smart contracts for the front end as well if you go to the Aragon app for example it is upgraded its front and subgrade we are a decentralized package manager we created so in the future the community may be able to actually approve those updates so if you're familiar with like NPM and everything that happen in NPM with like malicious software and stuff like that you know that centralized package managers are a huge security fail or like you know the Chrome Web Store the Chrome Web Store removed Mirrormask for some time and I mean they can only not do that but they can like replace it with a malicious code base for example and steal all your funds so we shouldn't be trusting Google Apple and all the others with this so if we introduce a credibility in the blockchain it is very important that the community has something to do with it and it's not just like a single address that can operate the contracts because how is that different from you know the world that we live in in which like Apple or Microsoft or whatever can upgrade the app you know without telling their users or requesting their approval so if you implement upgrade ability in a smart contracts please think about governance a little bit because otherwise we are going to create these centralized systems but then in practice if users go down the rabbit hole they will find out that you can replace the code and if you can replace the code it's not decentralized so please don't do that and then this is my favorite part do you know that you'd have was bought by Microsoft right and that was pretty bad so now there is amazing tool called panda and panda is decentralized yet on aetherium so what you see here is repo being created so you install panda you do panda in it you know it connects your ipfs know the theory note all of that stuff and then you can add origins at those versions they're live from the theorem blockchain and this super cool thing here is you can give fine-grained access to different contributors and different addresses and there is no single point of failure because for example you'd have goes frog in mind what they could do I mean they would pretty bad like they could basically take down the whole I tripped a movement like in no time but just like updating things on their servers which is pretty bad with panda that cannot happen and the cool thing about this also is once you have decentralized it you can put governance on top of it so you can have the community coburn how do you push updates to your software you can have the community go where and how you add features to your software you can have the community basically do everything and also this is super important for open source sustainability if you're familiar with aetherium and how the development is going you will see that even with the theory on having all of this value billions of billions of dollars the development activity is not like you know super great compared to what it could be so we're kind of fallen into a try you got the Commons there which is funny because the blockchain was supposed to remove a try of the Commons so that's what open source was ten ability comes in mind once you have a decentralized it on the blockchain you can start incentivizing people so you can start having like a basic income for the maintainer and for example you know you buy tokens of these decentralized or this open source project and then for those tokens you get governance power over which features to add or stuff like that and then you can sell them if you believe the open source project doesn't have any value but you can also buy tokens to fund the project I understand you get warns power and you get to like you know take maintainer so stuff like that if you multiple requests you know you get back the world stuff like that which is very powerful but also it's very exciting because it lets you give full control to the community and to the users because right now as I said before like clip the projects in the end are kind of this and centralized sorry with all the deep because like developers have a lot of power right so you're a developer you have push accessed to a repo you can commit a stuff so you can basically change the software however you want isn't something like this you may still have your branch and push whatever you want to that branch but then you may have some way of basically making sure the community come Vito your changes or can actually vote for what branch to pick as master for example so it's super interesting if you look for Panda nest for example which is the name of our grants program you will find a lot of things about it and you can run it it works today it's built on on Eragon and so the final Isis I want to talk about something we are working on because obviously I said a lot of like don't dues and some and some dues also as well some tips to decentralize projects but we are still not there ourselves that we are trying to make sure we can be centralized our legal entity we can decent rise our repos we can be centralize everything and John from our team worked on this very cool draft and a new genisphere one part of it which is the AAP an agpa stands for arrogance Aragon governance proposal very similar to like for example AI piece but in this case his brother is not just for improvement purposes for protocol this is more like in general to the Oregon project itself and i3 was very interesting because here John basically put six six different points of different tracks of what an AGP may look like so you have like but yet so transferring funds from the ballot account let's say the hot wallet of the project you know for example so we make like a like a grant to this project or stuff like that then you have foundation so there is staff that is very hard to be centralized for example trademarks right Canady a yo own a trademark well not yet there has to be a level into the own in it so here at the thought process is token holders come vote for making changes to the foundation for example Sal the foundation update the privacy policy for his website Sal the foundation change how the trademart is used or who should be allowed to use the Aragon trademark then you have meta which is changing this same document then you have proclamations and this gets very interesting right people were asking us for example what is arrogance stands on a IP whatever and we were like let's Paul our token holders and we and we did that with our token whole - what do you think about this a IP and they bought it and I think this is use that this is very a very interesting way of letting your community decide what are the proclamations of the whole Aragon Network of the whole project what does a praise think about relevant issues then you have repo so like it would be really cool if all the I own code base is actually using pandal and like the community has to prove changes and then after doing that we use something like our own package manager to deliver those packages so everything happens on chain from the moment you commit something to the moment you are using it so there is no central point of failure from the developer to the user no one single point of failure and then finally Treasury which is basically you know so we buy ten million dollars of Bitcoin for hedging purposes or a stuff like that on how to use a Treasury on the funds we have built all of these tools for ourselves like the package manager or television release package manager oregano is which enables you to create these very complex governance schemes and also Aragon yes and stuff like that which lets you create beautiful front ends for it without having to care a lot and we believe that our tools enabled through the centralization because that's what we want for ourselves we have built this for ourselves and then of course for the whole community to use if they like it and finally we have so many prizes for the hackathon but I there will be a worship about this they have to be like on observe stuff like that but we were just like the whole dev team is here so you need any help hacking or whatever just find us we are wearing Aragon virtual Delhi cm wearing like socks and shorts and like and we have some urge to to you away that is the link to the lights and that is the link to a developer portal where you can find more info about how to enable through the centralization with Aragon so enjoy and thank you [Applause]