When we talk about the development of the DAO movement, most of what we are actually exposed to is sunshine and rainbows, beautiful things. We haven't seen any major debates about distributed communities fighting for a common goal. Recently, however, we saw one of the DAO disagreements take the form of a legal dispute between Aragon, a leading DAO tool provider, and Autark, a coordination tool for building projects for digital cooperatives.

The article sparked a broad response from the Aragon Foundation itself, with Aragon co-founder Luis Cuende acknowledging that the legal dispute with Autark was unreasonable.

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Why would a son sue his father?

Back in 2018, Aragon launched a program called Flock, a grant prize to fund Aragon contributors to build extensions and tools and promote the Aragon ecosystem. Some of the more notable results of the program include projects like 1Hive and Aragon Mesh.

Autark is one of these grant recipients, initially receiving 390k DAI and 350k ANT in funding through AGP-19.

However, the Flock funding program was ultimately disbanded for a number of reasons, including a lack of accountability, high coordination costs, and difficulty monitoring KPIs for success. From both sides, it is understandable that the Aragon Foundation will cut ties to the initiative, as this would waste funds on initiatives such as Autark, which add little to no real value to the existing ecosystem.

On the other hand, many grant recipients (Autark again) depend entirely on this project to survive. Everything seemed to be going well when Autark applied for (and voted on) their second grant, AGP-73, but now things seem to be going downhill.

After Flock disbanded, Aragon cut off funding for its grant, so Autark filed a lawsuit demanding that Aragon fulfill its original AGP-73 commitment. In total, Autark sought a settlement of $800,000 from Aragon, resulting in Aragon's own countersuit.

Looking at this for the first time, the size of these grants is actually pretty insane Autark will receive 1.6 million DAI over the course of the year, divided into 400,000 DAI quarterly. While the grants I've seen aren't huge, these amounts are far higher than anything I've seen.

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Aragonese courts come in handy?

Perhaps the most exciting addition to the Aragon stack last year was the deployment of Aragon Court, a decentralized arbitration court where any Aragon DAO can bring governance claims to ANJ token holders. This is just one of Araong's many exciting features (many of which are yet to be released), and it shows why it may be the industry-leading DAO platform right now. Going a step further, Flock hopes to inspire products like the Aragon Court.

Now that the issue is out in the open, community members are calling for the use of ANJ holders (and the wider community) as dispute resolution proxies to resolve issues related to Autark directly in the Aragon courts.

While the Aragon Foundation says this is a special case and that legal action should be resolved in a tangible jurisdiction (in this case, Switzerland), it does open up an interesting issue. How should the wider Ethereum community respond to such controversies?

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