Aragon Court

Aragon Court (founded 2017) is a cryptocurrency token that was created on the Ethereum Blockchain and is utilized by jurors (via staking) to be enlisted into juries. The Aragon Court is a decentralized oracle protocol that manages non-objective disputes demanding the evaluation of human jurors.^[1]^[10]

ANJ is the native token of Aragon Court, which jurors need to activate in the Court to be selected and earn dispute fees. ANJ helps align the incentives of jurors with the long-term health of the Court, ensuring the Court's integrity.^[12]

Aragon Foundation

The Aragon Foundation was formed from the synergy between Aragon co-founders- Jorge Izquierdo and Luis Cuende. Both of Aragon's co-founders have strong backgrounds in real-time programming, open-source code, and operating systems. In 2011, Cuende and Izquierdo became friends via twitter after Izquierdo read Cuende's impressive achievements online. Both of them had worked on some number of start-ups which include Zcash mining farm. Whilst in the middle of developing another startup in 2016, Donald Trump was elected as president of the United States, leading them to develop a cryptocurrency project with the aim of restoring transparency and accountability in modern political and economic institutions. Aragon foundation came to bare in November 2016 a few days after the presidential election. Jorge Izquierdo said:

"we had developed a functioning product"- Izequierdo

The alpha version of the Aragon platform was released to the public in February of 2017.^[2]

Overview

The Aragon Network is the world's first digital jurisdiction and is itself operated as a DAO (Decentralized autonomous organization) that allows users to contribute using previously-set tools like smart contracts. It is an open-source and Ethereum-based project. The development of Aragon by its team is in pursuit of promoting the fight for freedom, transparency, decentralization, and accountability.

How Aragon Works

The understanding of how Aragon's ANJ work is encircled on its founder's central ideas for the Aragon project. And this includes transparency, decentralization, and accountability of governmental institutions, as well as a fair judicial system and a direct democracy. The Aragon's Manifesto speaks basically on the principle the ANJ is to work. Here are some of Aragon's Manifesto:

User's freedom of choice (self-sovereignty),
The dis-incentivization of violence (non-aggression),
The decentralization of power,
A long term value over short term profit,
The inclusion (i.e the ease of usability and user experience of an average person interacting with the Aragon network).
Aragon provides an ecosystem that aims at appropriating these principles, making it real. This ecosystem is such where anyone can create a decentralized autonomous organization, for-profit or non-profit, big or small. For example, virtual worlds, DeFi protocols, or even fashion houses can use Aragon to improve their communities.

Features

Aragon Court has some distinctive features which bring decentralization and the sense of adjudicating a case to users:

Aragon Dashboard

The Aragon dashboard is the central app where all dispute-related information is available for jurors and it provides quality information on becoming a good and active juror on the court, explaining how users are to view and manage the user's ANJ across three balances (i.e wallet, inactive, and active). It also provides a platform for buying ANJ by converting ANT, DAI, ETH, or USDC to ANJ. The Aragon's dashboard also gives a view of all live disputes or the ones the user will be adjudicating, from which users can explore the details, evidence, and timeline for any dispute. And it finally allows active users to earn dispute fees for successfully adjudicating disputes and monthly Subscription Fees for simply being an Active juror, either drafted in or not.^[3]^[4]

Aragon Tokens

There are more tokens than just ANJ in the Aragon network. There are three highlighted tokens by Aragon, which are:

ANT(Aragon Network Token) - is the token central to the Aragon network and is used for governance of the network.
ANJ (Aragon Network Juror) - is an ERC-20 token that is used for staking and jury duty rewards with the Aragon Court. It is bonded to ANT, wherein ANT tokens are deposited into a smart contract to mint ANJ tokens. ANJ tokens can be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges.
ARA - is an anticipated token that is to be used within the Aragon Chain (which is a Proof-of-Stake, EVM-compatible blockchain focused on DAOs) another protocol that will serve a pillar function within the Aragon network like the Aragon Court.^[5]

Aragon Court

The need for the evolving blockchain and cryptocurrency to have a court as a Decentralized autonomous organization has been seen by the Aragon foundation. And this interesting feature on ANJ- its courtroom (Aragon Court), is a dispute resolution protocol that handles subjective disputes that cannot be solved by smart contracts. The Aragon Court is a permissionless protocol where any participant can come and go without asking for anyone's authorization. Therefore the protocol must function with integrity even in the presence of malicious actors, who may pose as multiple jurors at once to "Sybil attack" the Court. The defense against these attacks begins with a simple staking system where juror impact is weighted by their active stake of Aragon Court's native token (ANJ).

Aragon Juror

Aragon Jurors, who are raised for truth and justice have certain responsibilities to perform in the Aragon court. This includes; reviewing arguments for a dispute and casting a vote. In order to help jurors properly execute their tasks, the Aragon Court's Dashboard provides all the tools needed by the jurors. The Juror in Aragon Court is also expected to lock a defined minimum balance of ANJ in a staking contract and then activate their ANJ to be eligible to be selected in Aragon Court cases. In exchange for their successful work, jurors can earn financial rewards for successfully adjudging disputes (which include- subscription fees, dispute fees, and ruling fees). The use of ANJ in Aragon Court helps align the incentives of jurors with the long-term health of the Court, ensuring the Court's integrity.

Aragon Connect

Aragon Connect is a toolkit for developers that unlocks the power of DAOs, thereby enabling developers to seamlessly integrate DAO functionality into apps.

ANJ Tokenomics

ANJ is an ERC-20 token created on the Ethereum platform. ANJ has a maximum supply of 129 Million coins and a circulating supply of 130 Million coins. Currently, the most active exchange market trading ANJ is Balancer. ANJ is a continuous token that is minted by depositing a reserve token (i.e ANT) into a bonding curve contract.

Trading ANJ

In addition to buying and selling ANJ Peer-to-peer, the following services will be of great help:

ANJ Bonding Curve

This service is provided to enable the conversion between ANT and ANJ for users by directly interfacing with the ANJ bonding curve. Examples of interface for such conversion includes, Aragon Convert and Etherscan.

Listed Exchange

The Aragon Court (ANJ) is listed and available for exchange on the following cryptocurrency exchange platform:

Uniswap
IDEX.^[6]

Buying Aragon Court (ANJ)

Users intending to buy Aragon Court (ANJ) on the majority of the cryptocurrency exchanges, will need to have Bitcoin (BTC) or Ethereum (ETH) to trade with since Aragon (ANJ) is an altcoin.

Tim Draper, an investor in Aragon who bought about 2.5% of Aragon tokens, said:

"Bitcoin is the evolution of money, and Aragon can become the evolution of governments"

Details to making the first purchase of Aragon court (ANJ) is explained below:

GUIDE I: Individual users (especially first-timers) are to access an exchange platform (for example Coinbase), where buying one of the Large cryptocurrency (i.e BTC or ETH) is done, and make a purchase of (BTC or ETH) using fiat money from the user's Credit card or Bank account.
GUIDE II: After getting either of BTC or ETH, the user is to invest the acquired cryptocurrency (whichever one the user bought, BTC or ETH) into an altcoin exchange that supports the trading of ANJ token (for example Balancer, IDEX).
GUIDE III: Finally, the user can now proceed to "Buy ANJ" on the Altcoin exchange using the right trading pair. For example, if the user bought BTC for trading ANJ, such will use ANJ/BTC trading pair; and if the user got ETH from the major exchange platform, such will use ANJ/ETH as the trading pair on the altcoin exchange.^[7]

Storing ANJ

Aragon cryptocurrency is an ERC-20 coin and can be stored on any wallet that supports Ethereum. Users intending to store ANJ for a considerable long time could explore keeping it safe using a hardware wallet. Ledger Nano S and Trezor are examples of hardware wallets that guarantee a high level of security to stored crypto tokens.^[8]

Aragon's New Democracy

Since Aragon was born out of the emergent societal crisis, and failure of democracy, the Aragon court is fighting in pursuit of a sane democracy. Aragon court says:

"We believe the fate of humanity will be decided at the frontier of technological innovation and human collaboration."- Aragon Court

The CEO of Aragon One, Luis Cuende, explained that the Aragon Network aims at creating new systems better for human coordination and that the Aragon ecosystem has a role in this.^[9] The Aragon network promotes freedom of choice, decentralization of power, inclusion, non-aggression, and transparency, among other values that are keen to having a good democracy. The key project within the Aragon cryptocurrency network is a digital court of law that resolves disputes between individuals and DAOs.

Roadmap

Aragon Court POC - March 2020

This deliverable includes the Aragon Court protocol, an interface for users of the court to review and manage agreements and disputes and an interface for jurors to participate in the arbitration process.

Proposal Agreements - March 2020

A Proposal Agreement is a human-readable document stored on IPFS and an associated Aragon forwarder that is used to interact with an Aragon Voting app. When the court is released, an organization will be able to use the App Center to install and configure a proposal agreement.

Precedence Campaign - March 2020

a series of simulated disputes to stress-test Aragon Court

Aragon Agreements - March 2020

Aragon Agreements leverage Aragon Court to allow Aragon organizations to benefit from the richness of subjective terms and conditions that can either not be expressed in smart contracts or when doing so would result in a complicated and slow-moving organization.