Aragon, the decentralized governance project and behind altcoin ANT, has been dealing with a conspiracy theory lately. Aragon fired at least half a dozen community members this week after a debate over the project’s finances turned into a conspiracy. Here are the details…
Altcoin project in crisis: Members fired
Jessica Smith, Aragon’s director of communications, said “coordinated” actors flooded Aragon’s Discord server with “inappropriate language”. The chatter and the influx of members came as Aragon struggled to bring its great treasure under community control. “We have reason to believe that these actors are coordinated and linked to past governance interventions in other DAOs,” Smith said, without detailing the allegations. “Therefore, we decided to act quickly to keep our community safe,” he added.
Aragon’s response to the situation has put its status as a bona fide DAO into question. The project exiled a number of community members. A media outlet speaking to people “expelled” from the project revealed interesting details. He noted that most of the seven community members who were fired from the DAO were ANT investors and thus members of the DAO. It is also stated that they have been members of Aragon’s Discord account for months.
As a result, Aragon pressed the “ban” button on its members. Thus, he highlighted the tension between the “power of the people” in a DAO and the fact that several stakeholders often have enormous influence. Aragon’s Discord moderators “ban” community members and “delete their views”; It goes against the idea of “censorship-resistant” cryptocurrencies. For this reason, the project drew reactions from some people.
Change in Aragon’s DAO takes time
Aragon develops software to support DAOs. Aragon’s own community voted on the project’s expenditures about a year ago. They voted to have influence over how Aragon spends its treasury, which holds more than $70 million worth of crypto. As a result of the voting, they moved rather slowly. After months of delays, Aragon finally started moving the money into a new structure under DAO control. At the same time, moderators began banning anyone who questioned the project and its leadership.
Smith claimed in an email that the banned members had experienced “similar incidents” at other DAOs. He declined to provide further details as to why Aragon believed in the “coordinated” actors conspiracy. But he said the information came from a “reliable source”.
ROOK link attracted attention
Interestingly, every banned member kicked out of the community is also a member of ROOK, which dissolved its DAO last month after activist investors called for the project to return capital to token holders. This development came through a series of votes on the on-chain treasury. Smith said ROOK DAO membership was “not the basis for the decision.” A Rook and Aragon DAO member named CollinM11 commented on the beginning of the ban in his Twitter message. He said it started after a prominent member of the Rook community led Aragon to Discord’s discussion of RFV. The activist investor, nicknamed Wismerhill, who advocated the collapse of the Rook DAO, said:
Basically, it is used in DeFi when a token has a treasury greater than its market value. So his team is either destroying value or siphoning off DAO-controlled resources until the end of time.
Wismerhill said there is “zero similarity” between Rook, a project whose product development has been stagnant for months, and Aragon, which is actively being built and also has mechanisms to return value to token holders. “The only reason Aragon is of interest is because they can repurchase ANT tokens,” he said. Smith said the bans were temporary, but did not give a timetable for reinstating the situation. At the time of writing, altcoin ANT is changing hands at $2.87, down 4%, according to cryptokoin.com data.
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