Aragon Association to Dissolve and Distribute $155 Million to Token Holders

According to Cointelegraph, the Aragon Association (AA), the governing body for the aragonOS software, will dissolve and distribute most of its assets to token holders. In a Nov. 2 blog post, the AA announced it will distribute 86,343 Ether (ETH), approximately $155 million at the current price, from its treasury to token holders as it unwinds. The funds will be distributed through a smart contract on the Ethereum network, with each Aragon (ANT) token holder receiving 0.0025376 ETH ($4.57 at the current price) per ANT they send into the redemption contract. After all redemptions have been made, the body will burn all ANT held in the contract and dissolve, with ANT no longer having utility after this point.$11 million from the treasury will be transferred to the Aragon Shield Foundation and held to cover outstanding obligations and mitigate against regulatory uncertainty. The team will reorganize as a company that will continue to develop Aragon products, and a Product Council will be created to help guide decisions about product development. Aragon is the developer of aragonOS, a set of developer tools that can be used to create decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the Aragon App, which allows developers to create DAOs without needing to write code.The AA cited bureaucratic complexity, misaligned stakeholders, and failed attempts at modifying the governance as reasons for its decision to unwind. The organization tried to save itself through a rushed attempt to vest control of the treasury directly in the hands of ANT holders, but a volatile gap between the value of the treasury and the token market cap prevented this attempt from being successful. As a result, it decided to return funds to investors and dissolve the association. In May, a group called Risk Free Value (RFV) Raiders attempted to take control of the Aragon treasury by purchasing ANT tokens and outvoting the association, which the association referred to as a 51% attack. In response, it scrapped plans to transfer power to token holders. The team launched a Base network version of its DAO creation tools on Aug. 9.