Aragon Court - New Innovation for Decentralised Organisation

Decentralised technologies aiming to put the users in control of their online presence have gathered steam in recent months. Sustained pressure on tech giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook to come clean on their data processing practices has led to this moment.

It is maybe because of the sheer reach that now one is also able to notice the lacunae in the tech scheme of things. As has happened in the past, with every problem that appears to be unsolvable, there is a no new breakthrough in the horizon. In this age, the problem of privacy and loss of trust on the big tech companies is expected to be solved by the advent of Blockchain.

Aragon Platform is one such leading example that using the Blockchain technology to impact our future in more than one way. Aragon Platform’s Manifesto states that they want technology to be used as a liberating tool to unleash the creativity and goodwill of our species. Its objective for its creation is very aptly summarised as under.

Decentralized technologies provide users unparalleled power to transact and interact with a level of security never seen before. Thanks to cryptography and economic incentives, users can now own truly sovereign assets, create fully sovereign entities, and build truly sovereign identities. They solidify freedoms that cannot be taken away, not even by actors with sizeable resources. This tectonic shift requires a new method for organizing these sovereign individuals: decentralized organizations.

Aragon Platform believes that the world can collaborate in a borderless manner. The tools being built by Aragon Platform will transform governance in a way never seen before since Ford’s Assembly line innovation. Instead of it being something imposed on others, it will be something that people will opt into. Individuals will be able to freely express themselves and transact with each other without any kind of intermediary exercising their unjustified power and oppressing them. It also aims to create processes wherein entry and exit into the governance system is as frictionless as possible. For an organisation that is committed to enhance liberal values and democratic governance, it is important to understand its internal functioning. Aragon Platform works on the basis of Proof of Stake protocol wherein individuals/entities who hold aragon tokens decide the future course of action for the Aragon Platform. All major proposals are put for vote and based on the final result, future course of action is taken. One of the major innovations that they have brought out is the Aragon Court which has been launched recently.

The existing Aragon infrastructure enables users to create, manage and run decentralised organizations. Aragon organizations exist as a combination of smart contracts that define the organization's stakeholders and their associated rights and privileges. However, some rights and privileges require subjective constraints that cannot be encoded in a smart contract directly. The Aragon Court is precisely designed to address such situations.

The Aragon Court is a decentralized oracle protocol that can be used by organizations to resolve subjective disputes with binary outcomes. When combined with the existing Aragon infrastructure, it enables an organization to create proposal agreements that define subjective constraints on an organization's operation and can be enforced by minority stakeholders. If a stakeholder feels that a submitted proposal has violated the proposal agreement terms then they can raise a dispute. While raising a dispute they will need to deposit an equivalent amount of collateral, along with initial dispute fees as determined by the Aragon Court. The vote on any proposal would be halted till the time the dispute has not been resolved there by safeguarding the interests of minority stakeholders.

The Aragon Court also allows individuals to take part as jurors by depositing Aragon token into Court’s staking contract. The Court will rule based on the verdict of the Jurors of particular cases.