Following the attack, the Aragon Association has decided to cancel its previously announced plans to grant voting rights to ANT token holders over its DAO (Decentralized Autonomous Organization).
Aragon, a platform for creating decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), has decided to revoke its initial proposal of granting voting rights to holders of its native Aragon (ANT) tokens. This means that ANT token holders will no longer have the ability to vote on the future direction of the organization.
In a tweet on May 9, the Aragon Association, which is based in Switzerland and responsible for overseeing Aragon, stated that it took action to fulfill its responsibility to safeguard the organization’s treasury and overall mission. As part of this effort, they decided to repurpose the Aragon DAO and incorporate it into a new grants program.
The Aragon Association made this decision in response to a 51% attack on the recently launched Aragon DAO. The attack was carried out by a group called the “Risk Free Value (RFV) Raiders,” who aimed to manipulate the use of ANT tokens for their own financial benefit.
Today, the Aragon Association took action to protect its treasury by transforming the Aragon DAO into a grants program. This decision was made in response to an organized attack by a group called the “Risk Free Value Raiders,” who were responsible for taking down Rook DAO.
“As per a blog post by Aragon, it is claimed that the RFV Raiders, who were involved in the attack and liquidation of Rook DAO in April, are connected to activist investors from Arca Capital Management, an asset management firm. These investors allegedly refer to themselves as the “vultures of crypto.”
The blog post provided additional information and insight into the controversial decision.
“The main purpose of the Aragon treasury was to provide support to developers who work on advancing decentralized governance infrastructure”.
Aragon clarified that due to Swiss regulations requiring the funds to be used for the intended purposes, it has a fiduciary duty to protect those funds from individuals who aim to exploit them for personal financial gains”.
“There is strong evidence indicating that the entities involved in the attack on Aragon have a clear intention of achieving that objective”.
In a Twitter thread posted on May 9, the current status of the Aragon DAO was explained. It mentioned that Aragon transferred an initial payment of 300,000 USDC (a stablecoin) to the Aragon Grants DAO. According to Aragon, the funds currently held by the DAO will remain on the blockchain and will be governed by holders of wrapped ANT (wANT) tokens.
On May 2, Arca Capital wrote an open letter in response to a previous disagreement where some stakeholders were banned from Aragon’s Discord. The letter partially explained the recent 51% “attack.”
Arca stated that it was important to enable token holders to explore innovative solutions to restore value to the token, while also allowing Aragon to continue developing important public goods for DAOs. They mentioned that this process could not commence until the progress of the treasury transfer is more advanced.
Aragon’s choice to repurpose its DAO comes slightly more than a month after the team announced a closer partnership with Polygon Labs, a well-known Ethereum scaling organization.
Following the announcement, the price of Aragon’s native ANT token experienced a slight decrease of approximately 4%, dropping from $2.95 to $2.83. However, as of the time of publication, the price of ANT has risen by 2% in the last 24 hours, as reported by CoinGecko.
