Decentralized governance project Aragon has banned not less than 6 DAO members after they accused them of launching a "coordinated" attack against the project. The team behind the project was discussing the project's finances before the incident happened. Those banished from the forum were said to have used "inappropriate" words that demeaned the project objectives. Aragon DAO team said they termed the assault "coordinated" because of how simultaneous it was.
Aragon’s head of communications, Jessica Smith, told CoinDesk in an email that they believed those behind the attack during the discussions at the forum were paid actors. She said they believed the actors were trying to bring disarray to their community. So to keep their community safe, they had to be banned from accessing their discussion forum.
"We have reason to believe these actors are coordinated and connected to past governance interventions in other DAOs. Therefore, we decided to act swiftly but temporarily to keep our community safe," Jessica Smith said.
Aragon's major action was to exile the community members involved in the scandal. While this has brought some makeshift calm to the community, there are still tensions over Aragon's beliefs. The belief that power belonged to the community at Aragon DAO is now being questioned by other community members. Aragon admitted this while speaking to CoinDesk on the matter.
CoinDesk also reached out to those banned from the Aragon community and discovered they were all investors in an Aragon coin named ANT. Since they were investors, there were legal members of the DAO. CoinDesk also discovered that Aragon discord moderators have the power to remove members who hide their opinions. It further dents Aragon's claim of "power to the community."
Weird Connection
While communicating with the defaulters of Aragon's community, CoinDesk found a weird connection between them. They were all members of ROOK, which last month dissolved its DAO. The series of events that happened at ROOK was exactly what was going to happen at Aragon before the intervention of the DAO moderators. At ROOK, the investors of the project called for the project to return capital to its token holders, and this led to the removal of its DAO. However, Jessica Smith has denied the ROOK incident being the basis of their decision.
But Jessica Smith admitted that what was happening at Aragon was becoming similar to ROOK before the intervention. Apparently, a Rook and Aragon DAO member named CollinM11 revealed that some of the banished members wanted to start the same community revolution that happened at ROOK. They tried to turn Aragon’s Discord into a discussion of risk-free value. But the Aragon development team wasn't in support of this, which ultimately led to the sanction of the 6 community members.
"Basically, it is used in [decentralized finance, or DeFi] when a token has a larger treasury than market cap. Aka team is either destroying value/or siphoning DAO controlled resources to the end of time. Aragon is only interesting because they could do buybacks," an activist investor known as Wismerhill, who championed Rook DAO’s collapse, said.