Dao, What Is Next, After ICO, And Defi, LUIS CUENDE, aragon CEO. technology

Back in January, I mentioned in my AraCon talk that there was ongoing research on Aragon Chain. It had become clear that it was something that we needed to do to ensure Aragon could scale to serve the amount and type of users that need the product.

At that time, we were thinking that it made sense to develop an application-specific blockchain, building Aragon natively at the core of the chain, and only later add a general purpose VM to allow extensibility. With that direction in mind, building Aragon Chain using Substrate and relying on the Polkadot network for security was the most promising path forward.

When we had conversations with people working on Polkadot, we expressed our doubts on whether to use WebAssembly or EVM as the VM for smart contracts in Aragon Chain. We were recommended to use Wasm (which I too believe is a better VM than EVM by almost every metric), but we were told that building an EVM module for Substrate "could be done by a decent engineer in two weeks".

We had to put our research on Aragon Chain on hold during the first half of the year as we needed to direct all of Aragon One's R&D resources to building Aragon Court and launching the Aragon Network. During summer, as research work on the Aragon Network was mostly completed and it was just a matter of finishing the implementation, we started working on Aragon Chain again.

But during those 6 months, a lot has happened in terms of Aragon development. Significant work was done on two major app suites (Aragon Fundraising and Open Enterprise), and more than 15 useful Aragon apps were under development and almost ready to be released. The way in which these apps increase Aragon's utility and how fast they were getting built has definitely exceeded my expectations.

When coming back to Aragon Chain research again, it became really clear that we had to approach the problem from the opposite side: start with a chain with a general purpose VM which was compatible with everything that had been built to that point, and later on work on chain level optimizations to improve the performance of using Aragon.

With this in mind, an EVM-compatible chain became the only possible path forward and the only aspect that we couldn't compromise on. After receiving non-positive answers regarding EVM support in Substrate (incompatible with our target launch timeline) and discovering that Ethermint (with an EVM module for Cosmos SDK) was going to be finished before the end of the year, we started reconsidering whether Substrate was the best technology to build Aragon Chain.

Cosmos SDK and Ethermint
Back in August, we became aware that Ethermint and the EVM module for Cosmos SDK were being worked on by ChainSafe. The Ethermint project seemed stalled for a long time and they had now contracted with them to get it ready for production. After meeting with ChainSafe we learned that they were almost done and their target for completion was early Q4 2019.

After a productive meeting with the Cosmos team, Aragon One engaged ChainSafe to evaluate what the best technology for building Aragon Chain was. We structured the initial engagement around a feasibility study to compare both Polkadot and Cosmos in terms of how we could build a chain that satisfied Aragon's needs.

Since we started reviewing the first drafts of the report, we felt that it aligned with our own research that we were doing internally while the report was being worked on. Cosmos SDK with the EVM module that ChainSafe was working on for Ethermint was the best way to go for us to build Aragon Chain.

The report was made public yesterday as part of ChainSafe's AGP and can be read here. I encourage reading the full document in order to understand not only in what ways the two platforms are different, but also how some of Aragon Chain's features can be built.

Given the work that has already been done on both Cosmos SDK and Ethermint, launching Aragon Chain would require considerably less work than any alternatives. By having a chain with EVM support, aragonOS and all existing Aragon apps can be deployed to Aragon Chain without any work. The Tendermint proof of stake algorithm is the most battle-tested PoS consensus currently available, having secured over a billion dollars in value.

On launch, Aragon Chain, with just support for vanilla EVM will already have considerably more throughput than Ethereum mainnet (targeting between 2-10x) and it will probably be the only real proof of stake EVM chain available (unless someone else launches a chain faster).