ChainSafe to Build Aragon Chain

Authored by Colin Schwarz

ChainSafe is excited to announce that we will be building an alternate chain optimized for Aragon usage for the Aragon community. We were recently engaged by Aragon One to analyze the technical feasibility of the various options which Aragon could pursue in order to create a second implementation that leverages a proof-of-stake blockchain ecosystem. The focus of the report was to compare and contrast the technical benefits of using either the Polkadot or Cosmos network for this purpose. Aragon One framed the report with a set of questions for ChainSafe to answer. The scope included a requirement that the Aragon Chain remain EVM compatible and maintain feature parity with the original implementation on Ethereum. With all of this in mind, our team conducted extensive research into the various options for building Aragon Chain on both Cosmos and Polkadot. After focusing on EVM compatibility, we made sure to compare and contrast as many aspects of each network as possible and to point out areas in which it was not possible to make direct comparisons. We also investigated the projected timelines for development and completion for each project, as timing was to be an important consideration. The full report can be read here.

The next step towards making Aragon Chain a reality was to submit the idea as an Aragon Governance Proposal (AGP) to be voted on by all ANT holders. Greg and Aidan submitted the proposal as AGP-106 and the report was made public. Greg was sure to remain active on the AGP thread to answer any questions that participants brought forward leading up to and during the vote. The voting closed on November 2nd and the results that came back for "AGP-106 Develop Aragon Chain" were a resounding yes. ChainSafe is ecstatic that the Aragon community supports this endeavor and is very excited to begin working on the project. There are four deliverables for this project:

1. Publish Aragon Chain spec

2. Develop full-node software that follows the Aragon Chain spec

3. Launch Aragon Chain testnet

4. Launch Aragon Chain mainnet

We are thrilled to be contributing to the Aragon network and really look forward to working closely with the Aragon One team. Furthermore, the ChainSafe team is excited to dive deeper into the Cosmos ecosystem and see what optimizations we can achieve with Cosmos-SDK and Ethermint. We will soon publish a follow up article with some more details about Aragon Chain and how we plan to build it, touching on Cosmos, Ethermint and the Cosmos/Ethereum bridge. Stay tuned!