Aragon Upgrade (ANT v2)
By: Brett Maverick Musser
Tags: Migration, Aragon Networks, Aragon, Decentralized Apps, Ethereum

The Aragon Network was one of the early projects to launch on the Ethereum network in mid-2017. The white paper was released on April 20th, 2017 and shortly after, the sale and distribution of the Aragon Network Token (ANT) commenced. ANT was one of the earliest governance tokens that could be used to participate in the Aragon DAO.

What is Aragon?

The Aragon Network provides basic ethereum based services that are needed to make decentralized organizations possible and widespread on ethereum.

Aragon is a meta-DAO in the sense that the Aragon Network is a DAO that has created a Dapp that abstracts the process of creating and managing a DAO for the end user. The end users right now are the Aragon developers and users themselves, Ethereum developers, and users of DAOs operating on or around Ethereum and other blockchains.

And just like any other digital asset it can be self-custodied, sent to another address, and received as payment. But the ANT token preceded the widely used ERC-20 standard and its contract does not use the ERC-20 standard and instead used up until October 2020, the MiniMe standard.

“MiniMe was a foundational primitive for many of our products and was tightly coupled with the original voting app. Unfortunately, MiniMe is very expensive — its transfers cost roughly 3x more than a standard ERC-20 transaction. There have also been other amazing developments in the world of Ethereum tokens, including gasless transfers. Gasless transfers enable relayers or other third parties to subsidize token transfers for users. That way, users don’t need to have ETH or incur costs while transferring tokens” — Aragon Blog

According to the Aragon project, the new ERC-20 contract brings a few advantages over its MiniMe predecessor:

(1) The new contract is optimized to save an estimated 66% on gas fees for ANT v2 users compared to similar transactions done in the ANT v1 smart contract.

(2) The new contract also supports something called “meta-transactions”. The purpose of enabling these transactions is to empower accounts without ETH the ability to use and interact with the Aragon Dapp with no ETH. With meta-transactions, the Aragon network or third party services would be able pay or subsidize the ETH gas costs incurred for using ANT in the Aragon Dapp. These meta-transactions can improve onboarding, usability, and could enable other creative combinations.

(3) Holders of the new ANT will also be able to vote on proposals to vote and upgrade the Aragon DAO similar to other governance tokens. But now they can do a lot of the voting safely off chain now further reducing costs for ANT holders.

“The landscape and technology has changed a lot since 2017, so it’s time for ANT to get an upgrade.” — Aragon Blog

How To Migrate Your ANT v1 Tokens:

(1) Login to Edge and tap on the three dots to the right side of your ETH/ANT wallet in Edge.

(2) Next, tap on “Master Private Key” from the options presented.

(3) Type in the password for your Edge Wallet.

-Diligently write down the seed and double check you’ve written it down correctly; FYI you cannot copy your private seed in the Edge Wallet

-We do not recommend taking a screenshot as it might save into the cloud and if that gets compromised an attacker would be able to access those funds

-We create some friction(s) to get to your private key because it highly sensitive controls all of the assets of your Ethereum wallet

(4) Install Meta-Mask on your browser and import your private key into your Meta-Mask browser wallet.

(5) After the import is successful you should see your entire balance and all the tokens from your Edge ETH wallet in your Metamask wallet. All the tokens and fiat amounts in Metamask should match what is shown in your Edge wallet for that particular ETH wallet.

(6) Go to the ANTv2 conversion page

(7) Connect your Metamask wallet to the conversion tool.

(8) Conduct the swap from v1 to v2

-The swap can be expensive since it’s a more complex transaction than a simple send and receive transaction.

-Make sure to have at least $15–20 worth of ETH in your wallet just in case; Hopefully you have enough ANT to make the swap economically rational.

To check the status of your conversion transaction, use Etherscan to look up your public Ethereum address which will have information on the latest state of your ETH wallet.

Edge & ANT

We’ll have default support for ANT v2 in an upcoming release but if you don’t want to wait for that you can add the ANT v2 token yourself in the Edge wallet via the add custom token feature in Edge.

ANT v2 token balance is visible in Edge today, however, we might not have a price feed for the new contract right away so your fiat balance might show a zero but your token balance will be shown regardless of whether a fiat price feed has been added yet.

We’ll be adding the new ANT contract by default in an upcoming release, so if you’re ok with waiting a little bit, we’ll have the ANT v2 token contract supported in Edge by default with a fiat price feed attached by default.

If you have any questions and/or issues please reach out to our support at support@edge.app.

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