Aragon Bans At Least 6 DAO Members During Crypto Treasure Discussion

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Decentralized governance project Aragon banned at least half a dozen community members from its place this week as a discussion over the project’s finances turned sour and turned into a conspiracy.

On Tuesday, coordinated actors flooded the Aragons Discord server with probing questions and inappropriate language, Aragons communications manager Jessica Smith told CoinDesk in an email. The influx of chatter and new members came during a crucial but long-delayed effort to move Aragon’s considerable treasury under community control.

We have reason to believe that these actors are coordinated and connected to past governance interventions in other DAOs, Smith said without elaborating on either claim. Therefore, we have decided to act quickly but temporarily to keep our community safe.

Aragon’s response was to exile a group of community members who had questioned its leadership, processes, and status as a Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) in good faith. CoinDesk spoke to seven community members affected by the ban, most of whom said they were investors in ANT (and therefore members of DAO), Discord members for months, or both .

In smashing the banhammer button on his own constituents, Aragon underscored the uncomfortable tension between a DAO’s illusion of people power and the reality that a few stakeholders often wield outsized influence. Aragons Discord moderators have the power to define (or reignite) the conversation by banning dissenters and removing their opinions, actions contrary to the idea of ​​a censorship-resistant cryptocurrency.

Aragon builds software to support DAOs, crypto clubs where token owners have a say in trading decisions. Aragon’s own community of ANT holders voted nearly a year ago to have more direct influence over how the project spends its treasury, which holds cryptocurrencies worth more than $70 million.

The transfer was anything but smooth. After months of delays and sluggishness, Aragon’s power brokers finally began moving money into a new structure under the DAO’s control on Tuesday. Around the same time, its moderators began seemingly banning anyone who questioned the project and its direction.

In an email, Smith claimed the banned members had a history of similar incidents at other DAOs. She declined to provide further information on why Aragon believed the alleged behavior was carried out by coordinated actors, but said the information came from a reliable source.

One common thread: Every banned member CoinDesk has spoken to is also a member of ROOK, which last month disbanded its DAO after activist investors called on the project to return capital to its token holders. This happened thanks to a series of votes regarding his on-chain cash.

Smith said joining ROOK DAO was not the basis for the decision.

A member of Rook and Aragon DAO who goes by the name of CollinM11 said in a Twitter post that the mass ban started after a prominent member of the Rook community tipped Aragons Discord into a discussion about risk-free value, or RFV, better known in traditional financial circles as book value.

It is mainly used in [decentralized finance, or DeFi] when a token has more cash than market capitalization, said the activist investor with the screen name Wismerhill, who defended the collapse of Rook DAO. Team Aka destroys value or siphons off DAO-controlled resources until the end of time.

Wismerhill said there was no similarity between Rook, a project whose product development had stalled for months, and Aragon, which is actively building and also has mechanisms to return value to its token holders. Aragon is only interesting because they could do ANT token buybacks, he said.

Wismerhill said he was immediately banned on the strike after logging into Discord on Tuesday to catch up on the drama.

Even so, not all Exiles are as notorious as Wismerhill. Others are just occasional posters who said they were asking well-meaning but pointed questions about Aragon’s timeline. After all, cash transfers were first allowed almost a year ago.

Smith said the bans were temporary but did not give a timeline for reinstatement. She declined any further comment.

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