Following the attack, the Aragon Association has decided to retract its proposal to grant voting rights to ANT holders over its DAO.
In response to the recent attack, Aragon, the open-source framework for decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has decided to withdraw its proposal that would have granted voting rights to its native token holders (ANT) regarding the organization’s future direction.
On May 9th, the Aragon Association, which oversees the management of Aragon, announced via a tweet that it had exercised its “fiduciary duty” to protect its treasury and mission. As part of a new grants program, the Aragon DAO would be repurposed, reflecting the organization’s commitment to ensuring the security and sustainability of its operations.
The decision was made after the recently launched Aragon DAO suffered a 51% attack at the hands of a group called the “Risk Free Value (RFV) Raiders,” who were seeking to manipulate the use of ANT as a means to achieve financial gain.
According to a blog post from Aragon, the RFV Raiders are linked to the recent attack and liquidation of Rook DAO, which occurred in early April. Aragon alleges that the Raiders are activist investors from the asset management firm Arca Capital Management who refer to themselves as the “vultures of crypto.”
The blog post shed further light on the controversial decision:
“The Aragon treasury was established with the explicit mission of supporting builders to advance decentralized governance infrastructure.”
Aragon explained that because of Swiss regulations that mandate its use for those stated ends, its fiduciary duty compels it to “secure these funds from those seeking to access them for their own financial gains.”
“There is clear evidence that the entities involved in Aragon’s attack are pursuing that end.”
A May 9th Twitter thread detailing the current status of the Aragon DAO explained that Aragon transferred an initial payment of 300,000 USD Coin to the Aragon Grants DAO. Aragon claims the funds currently held by the DAO will remain on-chain and are to be governed by wrapped ANT (wANT) holders.
In an open letter dated May 2nd, Arca Capital addressed a previous disagreement that resulted in certain stakeholders being banned from Aragon’s Discord. The letter provided a partial explanation for the recent “51% attack” incident, shedding some light on the circumstances surrounding it.
According to Arca, it was deemed necessary to enable token holders to explore innovative solutions to restore value to the token, while also facilitating Aragon’s ongoing development of essential DAO public goods. However, Arca acknowledged that this process would require further progress in the treasury transfer before it could effectively commence.
Aragon’s decision to repurpose its DAO comes just over a month after the team announced further collaboration with the popular Ethereum scaling organization Polygon Labs.
The price of Aragon’s native ANT token stumbled a touch over 4%, going from $2.95 to $2.83, following the update. At the time of publication, the price of ANT is up 2% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data.
