(2021-01-11) Aragon Acquires Voting Project Vocdoni To Flesh Out Decentralized Governance Stack

Aragon Acquires Voting Project Vocdoni to Flesh Out Decentralized Governance Stack. Aragon Association, the stewards of a protocol that makes for the easy creation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has announced its acquisition of voting project Vocdoni from Estonia-based Dvote Labs Oü.

Vocdoni team members received an undisclosed amount of ANT, the native token of the Aragon network

Born out of the 2017 Catalan independence movement, Dvote Labs’ staff mostly consists of Catalans who experienced the suppression of a democratic vote firsthand. At the time, Catalonia tried to secede from Spain, which was deemed illegal. The vote ultimately fell flat after police suppression, riots and high-profile arrests.

Vocdoni combines decentralized infrastructure such as the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) with bleeding-edge zero-knowledge proofs (zk-SNARKs) in an effort to bring democracy into the 21st century, Arús said

The project, while not crypto-first, uses the Tendermint consensus mechanism also employed by the Cosmos blockchain. Vocdoni is built on Ethereum, however.

Arús said. “It’s infrastructure for digital societies,” he said.

“Vocdoni’s technology allows for infinitely scalable, free and anonymous voting with on-chain settlement. For us, that’s the Holy Grail of blockchain voting,” Joe Charlesworth, the group’s newly appointed executive director

For now, Vocdoni will continue working on local votes with municipalities and private organizations, Arús said. The addition of Ethereum throughput solution ZK-Rollups is expected later this year and should make the project capable of conducting elections consisting of the entire earth’s population, Arús claimed.

The acquisition comes hot on the heels of 12 resignations in the greater Aragon ecosystem, one from Aragon Association and 11 from Aragon One. Team members vaguely accused the Association of a lack of transparency in both leadership decisions and with the project’s initial coin offering (ICO) funds. 2021-01-07-DecentralizedCourtAragonHitWithFlurryOfResignations