Tennagraph: Contributing to the Aragon Universe

Blockchain has enabled the creation of decentralized governance ecosystems, with the power to decide and determine their platform’s development belonging to all stakeholders. Ethereum emerged as one of such revolutionary solutions, with an ambitious plan to create an alternative to conventional governments.

Aragon created an Ethereum-powered governance system without politics and corruption, empowering all users to determine the course of their system’s development by voting for EIPs.

What is EIP? The acronym stands for Ethereum Improvement Proposals, which are some critical changes and updates planned in the Ethereum system. To enable all users to participate meaningfully and directly in the voting process to determine the direction of Ethereum’s development, the founders designed Tennagraph.

This platform serves as an Ethereum signal aggregator, or Ethereum voting system, helping cover as many stakeholders as possible, enabling their direct representation, and simplifying the technical side of innovation by attracting partners with ready-made solutions instead of software development from scratch.

Here is the process of choosing EIPS:

Challenges

The primary challenge that Tennagraph faced was user clustering to enable the fair representation of knowledgeable ETH engineers instead of voting manipulation of Ethereum EIPs by ETH profiteers. Aragon needed to refine a part of its ecosystem and created Aragon Nest, a fund for financing its development.

What we did?

4irelabs had a sincere interest in that project, so we applied for the Aragon Nest grant on GitHub, offering our solution for the Tennagraph extension improving its usability. A competitor company had already applied with a similar solution and was awarded a grant for the project. But the first grant awardee failed to implement the required solution, and 4irelabs got the grant afterward.

Our primary solution for the Tennagraph platform was to incorporate an extension allowing simpler Ethereum voting. As Tennagraph initially was an open-source ETH solution for stance expression, the users could visit the website of Tennagraph and vote there by the following means:

• Coinvoting (by sending 0 ETH to the designated wallet to express their stance as yes, no, or abstain)
• Gas voting (by allocating gas spent by the voter to one of the stances – yes, no, or abstain)
• Influencer voting (by indicating the stance of a registered ETH influencer)

4irelabs added an easily accessible Tennagraph extension to the users’ browser allowing quick access to the board of EIPs. This solution enhanced the usability of Tennagraph, thus contributing to greater user activity in voting.

Technologies:

Infrastructure Cloud Platform: Digital Ocean, Ethereum, VueJS, Python Django + Django Admin

Besides, the 4irelabs engineers incorporated the GitHub link to a specific EIP into the EIP’s page on Tennagraph. In this way, they stimulated users’ closer acquaintance with the substance of EIP, allowing them to study the brief summary of the proposed improvement, to learn other users’ stances, and to develop an informed position on the subject.

The 4irelabs team participated in the 2019 AraCon Conference organized by Aragon in Berlin to present their technical solution. Today, all ETH stakeholders have access to the full Tennagraph functionality and can enjoy this solution for Web3 to take part in the life and development of their Ethereum community.