Abstract
Bitcoin can be thought of as the first prototypical decentralized autonomous organization (DAO). It created a network-based ecosystem of participants who contributed computational power toward a singular goal. In Bitcoin, the distributed protocol providing a financial service and rewarding miners became a rudimentary decentralized organization. In this chapter, we talk about more complex and full DAOs made in Aragon. Aragon (https://aragon.one/) is a decentralized application (DApp) that lets anyone create and manage different kinds of organizations (nongovernmental organizations [NGOs], nonprofits, foundations) on the Ethereum blockchain. Creating a DAO requires numerous steps and originally it was more difficult to implement in Ethereum. However, Aragon implements all the basic features of an organization in a base template that is deployed whenever a user instantiates a company. Most of the traditional features such as a cap table, voting, fundraising, and accounting are offered in Aragon as a decentralized counterpart to run on the blockchain. In addition, an Aragon company can be customized to a very granular extent and extended using new modules that can be added to a company’s existing smart contracts. Aragon enables different organizations to be built on the blockchain, and one interesting use case integrates identity using a two-way verification scheme with Keybase. We talk about how the Keybase to Aragon peg functions to provide identity services in the context of a decentralized system. We also briefly go over the Aragon kernel, which is essentially a task manager with subroutines that ensure smooth communication within an organization, among its members, and in the underlying blockchain.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Vikram Dhillon, David Metcalf, and Max Hooper
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dhillon, V., Metcalf, D., Hooper, M. (2017). Decentralized Organizations. In: Blockchain Enabled Applications. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3081-7_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3081-7_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Apress, Berkeley, CA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4842-3080-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-4842-3081-7
eBook Packages: Professional and Applied ComputingApress Access BooksProfessional and Applied Computing (R0)