Aragon, the decentralized management platform for companies, today announced a mass migration from the messaging platform Slack as a result of increased phishing scams and hacks within the community network. Aragon is among the leaders of a widespread community departure towards an open-source messaging platform.
Prominent projects with a combined market cap valuation of over one billion US dollars are making the move together, including Indorse, Cofound.it, OmiseGO, Streamr, Santiment, FOAM, Auctus, Golem, and Decentraland.
Built on Ethereum, Aragon is the first management tool developed specifically to disintermediate the creation and maintenance of organizations all around the world. Aragon will offer a new, more efficient model for organizations to operate and a way to deploy company-like structures anywhere the internet exists.
Aragon implements features such as cap table management, governance, fundraising, payroll, and accounting, supporting all areas of company management through an easy-to-use interface.
Luis Cuende, Co-Founder and Project Lead, Aragon stated:
“We started the proposal for the migration to an open source messaging platform after realizing that the current situation was unsustainable. Slack was designed for the internal use of projects; Slack lacks the tools necessary to run public facing communities, including the fundamental features required for projects in the blockchain space.”
“Migration to an open source platform will help us manage and govern our communities more efficiently and securely. The situation has worsened considerably with recent Slack updates that remove unique usernames, allowing scammers to easily pose as project members and leaving users with no way of distinguishing fake accounts.”
Aragon is collaborating with other decentralized projects who support the migration to select a platform which will better suit the needs of the blockchain community. The preferred platform for migration is Rocket.Chat, which the Aragon team asserts will best suit the needs of projects within the crypto community.
Many in the crypto community have become disillusioned with Slack due to the recent prevalence of phishing scams, and as a result, Aragon is raising awareness to encourage a shared solution for a problem affecting the entire blockchain space.
Leaders at many of the world’s most visible projects share Aragon’s concern. Decentraland, a distributed platform for a shared virtual reality world in which participants navigate, discover, and interact with others, last month conducted a token sale with participants from across the globe contributing the equivalent of $25 million USD in Ether in just ten seconds.
“Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly pervasive in Slack. It is time for open source projects to migrate towards open source messaging platforms to ensure long-term control over our security,” said Ari Meilich, Project Lead, Decentraland.
Indorse, a blockchain-powered decentralized network for professionals, aims to build a serverless, decentralized network where users benefit from platform growth and data insights rather than third parties.
“With the ongoing Slack scams and the refusal of Slack to address the problem, we have been looking for alternatives. Based on our evaluation of various products, Rocket.Chat seems to be the best option,” said Avadhoot Kulkarni, CMO, Indorse.
“Today we are pleased to announce support for the greater crypto community’s migration to a free software communications platform, Rocket.Chat. The Rocket.Chat team has agreed to work with all of us to make the most robust platform possible for our public community’s needs,” said Vansa Chatikavanij, Managing Director, OmiseGO.
“We want to be clear that Rocket.Chat is one of many excellent emerging choices for this migration. We look forward to continuing our support for platforms such as Riot.im in the future, which may play an important role in our community as its development continues. Liberally licensed, audit-friendly software is an important key to a free and safe society, and the developers of such software deserve all our support for their often unappreciated work,” added Chatikavanij.
“We are delighted to welcome the Ethereum based projects to Rocket.Chat’s global open source community. Selecting our leading open source collaboration platform will enable projects to take back full control on all aspects of security and data privacy, and reliably implement the pro-active protection measures that are essential to daily operation. Over the next few months, we look forward to working with all projects on improving and adapting Rocket.Chat’s feature set for the benefit of all cryptocurrency communities,” said Gabriel Engel, Founder, and CEO, Rocket.Chat.
Other projects such as Golem, a platform building a decentralized sharing economy for computers, is already using Rocket.Chat for internal communications.
“We are already using Rocket.Chat for our internal comms and it proved its usability. Now, it’s a good time to also use it externally for the good of the large community of over 10,000 Golem supporters,” said Marek Osiecimski, CCO, Golem.
The problems associated with Slack have recently reached a fever pitch, with phishing scams resulting in over $225 million USD worth of ether maliciously taken from prospective ICO participants. In total ten projects are following Aragon’s abandonment of the messaging platform, bringing with them at least 45,000 active users.
“We can’t have scam messages be the first thing a new member sees when entering our community platforms. That is unacceptable. We need to unite behind an open source platform which can provide safety and positive first experiences to our communities. Streamr is fully onboard the initiative started by the Aragon team,” said Henri Pihkala, CEO, Streamr, a project enabling a new way for machines and people to trade data, powered by the Ethereum blockchain.
Aragon recently introduced a widely lauded transparency framework, aiming to encourage industry-wide standards to safeguard industry stakeholders.
