Aragorn

Aragorn is institutional infrastructure for doing tradfi and defi on Ethereum.

It is inspired by the philosophy of institutional solutions such as Canton or Tempo Zones. Institutions are attracted to these because they are fully private due to the fact they are permissioned environments. They also allow institutions to have full control over what happens inside their own environment, and give specific users inside their environment scoped permissions and viewership.

Aragorn allows for all of this (and more!) on Ethereum.

An institution spins up a Ring, adds users like employees to it and does financial transactions such as payroll or insurance. No-one outside of the Ring can see any of it - they only see "Something happened on Aragorn." They don't even see which institution/Ring did the transaction as each Ring pulls from the same anonymity set.

Rings can also interlock with other Rings to do transactions with other institutions, such as repos (the biggest tradfi solution on Canton right now). Only the necessary information is revealed to each Ring, and nothing is revealed to the rest of the world. Even though it all settles on Ethereum.

Rings can interlock with Ethereum mainnet to plug into defi such as AAVE or Morpho, benefitting from crypto-native solutions anonymously.

This is an infrastructure product at its core and developers can build solutions on top of it to expand its offering. This could include anything from frontends for managing Rings to fully private institutional defi and other tradfi solutions.

For ETHGlobal, I have built the following abilities on top of the infra:

• Private payroll
• Private internal payments
• Repos between Rings
• Private Vault investment through Privy Earn
• Auditing & compliance

All of these things are possible in a dashboard for managing Rings, which also allows users to add other users, manage permissions/roles.

I truly believe that Aragorn or something similar is necessary for Ethereum to win the institutional market. We know what they want. They are already here and are going to walled gardens such as Tempo Zones. Let's give them the walled garden intuition they are used to, but let's build it on Ethereum. Aragorn does not invent crazy new technology - it's just a series of good abstractions.

The fundamental premise is simply UTXOs and zero-knowledge proofs (using ProveKit in a Groth16 wrapper).

It's similar to ZCash or Privacy Pools V2 or most other private payment system on blockchain, but with some extra configurations.

A Ring is a set of UTXOs. An institution shields / locks up their assets in a contract on Ethereum and receives UTXOs back. Those UTXOs are encrypted notes that only they can see. The Ring admin can then allow these notes to be visible or spendable by other people while maintaining control of them. This allows for employee-scoped permissions and audit keys. It also means no-one outside of the Ring can see them. Or alternatively, other Rings can see or use them by encrypting them to those Rings too.

Side note - the institution does not necessarily have to shield assets into the system to use them, as they are able to issue assets directly within the system and build their own contracts. This would stop the public from knowing how much they have in the Ring.

The identity layer is fully ENSV2 which helps with the intuition. aragornrings.eth is the top level domain, Rings are subnodes, and departments of Rings are deeper subnodes. The institution owns their name's subtree onchain.

Privy is used as configuration and wallet management so that institutions can add members to their Ring using their work email.