I have taken a look in this project. Did some reading. And I still don't understand what can be done with ANT tokens? Apart from p&d actions, what would effect its pricing?
I see on this blogpost, that the company bought back some of the tokens to distribute on actions like bug bounties, or paying some freelance employees. But those are not the main business of the company, rather means to their business. What I'm currious about is how would this company's vision/business success or failure will effect the tokens?
Btw, from where I stand, I don't think there is a chance that founders would just take away the ico funds and dissappear. They are and apparently will be working on this project, but as I said, I don't understand the needs for tokens (apart from dev funding) in this scenario. It could have made sense if the tokens somehow reflect some amount of company shares but they have stated that it's not the case.
ANT -like ETHER to Ethereum- is just a token with a given value determined by the market. When Aragon is implemented, those tokens will buy a number of things (read extensively about it in the white paper) and will be minted through the provision of a number of services and uses, via fees, much like proof of stake but different. It's future price will be determined, like now, by the market and their rate of inflation by the stakeholders of the coin.
If you believe in this project AND are willing to wait quite a bit of time, purchasing ANT now could be a great investment, but it is pure speculation -like every other coin with the possible exception of Dash, if you have a node-. Current price is quite steep (my opinion) considering all the circumstances and how long in the horizon is a reality of great usage of the Aragon Network AND some of it's key features (the Arbitration one is particularly complex and potentially quite manipulable). But these are times in which development of these things take a bit of time but implementation is usually pretty fast because, obviously, the first to use the applications are the organizations within the proper crypto world itself (think Ethereum, again), so neither of these projects needs to be implemented by a big brick and mortar organization -that seems to be in a very, very distant future and with a big IF in front of it- and can literally thrive on self-propagation of crypto projects. Specifically Aragon can become part of a chain (on top of the Ethereum blockchain) that includes other DAOs -potentially many of them- that will bring added features in a never ending (potentially) decentralized organizational and operational network for all kinds or organizations. You will notice I included a couple of times the word "potential".... in the foreseeable future though, you can look at Aragon as an improvement on the Ethereum smart contracts (allowing distribution of dividends, for instance, which Ethereum doesn't provide), among several other uses such as voting and arbitration (again, this one very far from proven effectively as of now).
I don't know if your interest is in sticking around for a while in Aragon to see what it can really do and what his worth ultimately be, or if you are thinking in investing in it for pure speculative purposes. If the later is the case, I believe there are many other projects that will probably have closer catalysts than Aragon. This one has a long and very winding road ahead before it reaches even a minimal part of what it is set to achieve.