We are working to build permissionless, open tech. Most of the process is open, but the part that remains the most closed and shrouded in secrecy is the early-stage financing. While this is in-part regulatorily and social norms driven, the more sinister component is insiders can disproportionately tilt the scales in their favor while keeping the details hidden from public view. The more early-stage investors get away with edgy behavior, the more emboldened and empowered they become, to the point where this power becomes detrimental to the health of the space as a whole.

Many folks in crypto today think about privacy backwards; instead of making sure their assets are private, they make the mistake of solely fixating on transactions being private. This is why we see people sending assets through mixers or coin-tumblers, only to return to transparent and trackable addresses, defeating the point of the mixer. Zooko Wilcox, a core contributing member of the Zcash community, voiced the confusion as follows: “You have to *store* your crypto in a private cryptosystem if you want privacy. Then it is safe to *move* it through a transparent system! Unfortunately, almost everyone has this backwards.”

In the process of capitalizing itself into relevance, this boom of crypto capital has built a native financial system to account for its very own bootstrapping. While the other revolutionary technologies no doubt led to evolution within the existing financial system, none of them built an entirely new financial system from scratch. Instead, they remained reliant on existing financial systems, placing power in predictable hands. Blockchains can be thought of as 21st century accounting and production systems owned by “the people,” and so it follows that the space has pioneered a new financial system to displace the old.

Over the last three years, Aragon has built a suite of governance tools that allow any organization to legitimately and transparently manage activities like community voting, treasury management, organization ownership, and contributor payroll. It takes less than five minutes and a few dollars to set up your own entity, with six templates to choose from and governance as simple as drag-and-drop. Organizations using these tools exist within Aragon’s digital jurisdiction. To further establish the rules of its jurisdiction, and resolve disputes within and between organizations, the team built the Aragon Court, which is now live on mainnet. To govern the jurisdiction, incentivize jurors in the court, and operate the infrastructure processing transactions, Aragon has a native governance asset (ANT), as well as derivative capital assets designed for specific purposes (ANJ, ARA).

Placeholder recently withdrew its governance proposal for Zcash’s Network Upgrade 4 (NU4), choosing to review and endorse other candidates based on our due diligence. For the uninitiated that may be reading this, NU4 will define the Zcash network’s allocation of block rewards to researchers, software contributors and other non-miner laborers. These policies will apply during Zcash’s second coinbase reward epoch, October 2020 to October 2024, and set a precedent for what Zcash’s stakeholders can expect from the network going forward. We think of the governance components of NU4 as a type of constitutional amendment to the Zcash protocol, and have been impressed with the rigor of ideas and debate that community members have displayed through this process.