Crypto Token Holders to Receive $155M After Aragon Association Dissolves

Aragon Association Dissolves, Distributing Assets to Token Holders

The Aragon Association (AA) is set to dissolve, and in the process distribute 86,343 Ether (ETH), worth approximately $155 million at the current price, to token holders. This will be done through a smart contract on the Ethereum network, whereby each Aragon (ANT) token holder will receive 0.0025376 ETH ($4.57 at the current price) per ANT they send into the redemption contract. After all redemptions have been made, the AA will burn all ANT held in the contract and dissolve, thus rendering ANT no longer having utility.

In addition, $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, with the help of a “Product Council” to guide decisions about product development.

Aragon is the creator of aragonOS, a set of developer tools that can be used to build decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), as well as the Aragon App, which allows developers to create DAOs without needing to write code.

In May, the Aragon Association made the decision to unwind due to bureaucratic complexity, misaligned stakeholders, and failed attempts at modifying the governance, which had only increased tensions within the project. They had attempted to save themselves 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 crypto token market cap of ANT prevented this from being successful. As a result, they decided to return funds to investors and dissolve the association.

This decision was met with an attempt by the Risk Free Value (RFV) Raiders to take control of the Aragon treasury by purchasing ANT tokens and outvoting the association, which the team referred to as a “51% attack.” In response, the association scrapped plans to transfer power to crypto token holders and instead launched a Base network version of its DAO creation tools on Aug. 9.