The Aragon Association, custodian of a protocol that facilitates the creation of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has announced the acquisition of the Vocdoni voting project from Dvote Labs Oü, based in Estonia.
The purchase was completed in December for an undisclosed price. Vocdoni team members received an unspecified amount of ANT, the native token of the Aragon network that can be traded with Bitcoin Revolution, as part of the acquisition, according to a statement by Vocdoni's CFO Joan Arús.
"Bringing Democracy into the 21st Century" with an online voting infrastructure
Born from the Catalan independence movement of 2017, the staff of Dvote Labs is mainly composed of Catalans who have experienced firsthand the suppression of a democratic vote. At that time, Catalonia tried to separate from Spain via a vote which was deemed illegal.
Citizens' votes ultimately counted for nothing after police crackdowns, riots and high-profile arrests. Vocdoni combines decentralized infrastructure such as InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) with cutting-edge zero-knowledge evidence (zk-SNARK) in an effort to bring democracy into the 21st century, Arús said. The project, although not crypto-first, uses the Tendermint consensus mechanism also employed by the Cosmos blockchain.
However, Vocdoni is based on Ethereum. The protocol sits in the midst of many other digital governance structures including Compound Finance and MakerDAO. However, Vocdoni's governance module is not necessarily directed solely for financial purposes, Arús said. “It's an infrastructure for digital societies,” he said.
Greater scalability for the project
The Aragon Association acquired Vocdoni to scale its current project and make DAOs global, the company said. “Vocdoni's technology allows infinitely scalable, free and anonymous voting with chain regulation.
For us, this is the holy grail of blockchain voting, ”Joe Charlesworth, the group's new executive director, said in a statement. "Although we have recently taken a step forward to allow out-chain voting with on-chain agreements, the privacy aspect and the use of a side chain and oracles to regulate on-chain votes is, in my opinion, opinion, unprecedented ".
For now, Vocdoni will continue to work on local votes with municipalities and private organizations, Arús said. The addition of the Ethereum ZK-Rollups throughput solution is expected later this year and should make the project capable of conducting elections consisting of the entire population of Earth, Arús said.
The acquisition comes in the wake of the abandonment of the greater Aragon ecosystem by 12 central staff members, one from the Aragon Association and 11 from Aragon One. Team members vaguely accused the Association of lack of transparency both in leadership decisions and with the project's initial coin offering (ICO) funds.
In fact, around 52.000 ETH ($ 62,4 million) from the ICO fund has recently been converted into largely stable assets without giving general warning to the community. The acquisition of Vocdoni is unrelated to the movement of ICO funds, Charlesworth said.
