LexDAO: law is a public good

List defined here:

  1. the “contributions” and “impact” paragraphs below:

contributions

LexDAO is a club of legal engineering professionals united to bring the traditional legal settlement layer to code and coded agreements to the masses. We believe that everyone deserves access to justice in a quick and efficient manner. If legal services were easier to use, verify and enforce, we could live in a fairer world.

LexDAO organizes sophisticated conversations and educational materials to help orient people around how to build in the new and evolving space. LexDAO focuses on Code is Law applications where practical legal theory is embedded into smart contracts, applications and networks. The efforts we undertake are all in the spirit of public goods and services. Many of our projects spin out into standalone tools or services; some examples include KaliDAO and Smart Invoice.

impact

We’ve done many projects over the years, and recently got a grant big enough to start publishing comprehensive annual reports!

Examples of high-impact are Real World Asset “RWA” offshoot projects like Tater and Cougar, using our offshoot project Kali for the DAO OS. These Kali RWA project are making important strides in web3 real estate. Like many other on-chain DAO deployers, Kali is the culmination of LexDAO Projects related to onchain governance, arbitration and corporate structures. The smart contract code is greatly simplified which makes it easier to read and secure assets on-chain.

Another example is Smart Invoice, a tool by a 3rd party built on LexDAO’s public-good lawtech LexLocker that is designed to provide web3 workers with cryptocurrency invoicing, escrow and arbitration capabilities. As with most LexDAO affiliated solutions, Smart Invoice is built in an open source framework so that other developers can build on top of its code. It is designed for clients and contractors to make the facilitation of crypto-payments easier to use and safer for both parties involved.

Community members don’t strictly need to pay to join, since LexDAO has both paid subscriptions and also contribution. More about that at Membership | LexDAO Legal Engineering Guild .

  1. “Law is a public good. If law isn’t a public good, all public goods are in threat.”

A more visceral ‘NSFW’ video by one of our core members here.

  1. SVG logo here.

  2. lexdao.org , x.com/lex_dao , lexdao.substack.com

  3. Signer.is - sign messages with your crypto wallet wallet: 0x966a4b9d5D2E01799170a0865C2D1cBBc1904163

Epoch 3 application form sumission with minor changes

what are your main project funding sources?

Grants funding, user donations, other.

how much have you raised for each of your funding sources and from who?

~79,500 OP from RetroPGF3, ~$70,000 from Gitcoin rounds, ~$710 from Giveth

are you seeking

Project-specific funding, funding for general operations

has your project launced or planning to launch a token?

No

share your project rodemap:

Finalizing now, because of the RetroPGF3 grant we’ve been able to switch from keeping the lights on to getting back to initiatives

what milestones have you achieved?

Cryptolawer directory, newsletter, weekly study group, ETHDenver events, multiple services and products offshoots such as https://twitter.com/cougardao , https://twitter.com/taterdao , https://doc.lex.clinic (running Creative Commons working group on NFTs), https://lexblock.xyz , https://twitter.com/kali__gg , https://twitter.com/ixiantech , https://www.daocoalition.org , https://x.com/web3coalition (got DDEX.net to create an NFT working group with a web3 leader as co-chair, Open Source Orchestra collab bull-revival plans for this year’s Music Biz conference), https://folk.gg (experiments in web3 permissionless-copyright), helped Hats Protocol integrate Snapshot.org and Gitcoin Passport

tell us more about milestones you’d like to achieve

During the bear market, we were focued on keeping the lights on. Now that we have funds again we plan to have a dedicated General Counsel who can produce public good templates for the web3 community, spin up the Journal of Legal Engineering with https://descier.science , attend and host events at multiple conferences as we did with ETHDenver 2024, turn grants-out back on including retroactive funding for groups like https://coala.global , improve our legal dicrectory, turn weekly legal hacks back on (we already turned weekly study group back on), switch to https://www.hatsprotocol.xyz governance, complete the web3-GAAP tools proto-described at https://ape.mirror.xyz as iNFTs and legal seals and likely other initiatives by our members as we open our roadmap up to DAO-wide planning this month.

funding goal and budget

$300,000 to fund the remainder of 2024 as we plan to spend the ~$300,000 RetroPGF3 grant within 6 months. Legal and automating law is expensive so we could definitely make a major impact if we had a million-dollar a year budget. However, as a DAO with a powerful self-evident idea as our mission – law is a public good – we can survive with no budget.

tell us more about your team

Some of the top legal engineers and cyptolawyers are members of LexDAO. Here is a list of some of our members: https://twitter.com/search?q=lexdao&src=typed_query&f=user https://twitter.com/search?q=lex_dao&src=typed_query&f=user

Our event at the Gitcoin House this ETHDenver had x3 the capacity sign up to attend: https://twitter.com/lex_DAO/status/1762904086633177247

social credibility (development progress, awards, notable GitHub commits, referrals)

KaliCoRicardianLLC | Address 0x581b5e51ffbb742f92e818fb177cad8a30e43f3e | OP Mainnet , GitHub - lexDAO/Ricardian , GitHub - lexDAO/LexLockerV2: Simple, multi-purpose escrow system for business on evm-compatible chains , GitHub - lexDAO/Kali: Optimized DAC Protocol , GitHub - kalidao/wrappr , GitHub - kalidao/keep: Tokenized multisig wallet. , LexNews+ Weekly | ⚔️ LexNews+ ⚖️ | LexDAO | Substack , https://lexdao.substack.com/ , https://ie.nani.ooo/ , GitHub - lexDAO/hackmd: https://hackmd.io/team/lex-dao

why’s your project important?

Law affects so many parts of our lives. Lowering the cost of law has an exponential impact on human collaboration. Legal automation offers amazing opportunities to lower costs, but not all law can be automated. As such, LexDAO works in deterministic law (very automatable) and discretionary law (high-level reasons). Most importantly, we do this work as open source for the public good. Too few organizations offer pro-bono web3 legal services, and there ais more demand than LexDAO can currently offer; an Octant grant will help us scale to meet demand.

what’s your project’s Twitter handle?

@lex_dao

GitHub link

project Discord link

http://

Discord contact:

@bestape

Telegram contact:

@bestape

wallet address:

0x966a4b9d5D2E01799170a0865C2D1cBBc1904163

anything else you’d like us to know?

We’d love to chat with you if you’d like to learn more about LexDAO. We’re a DAO with a complex legacy, so it migth make sense to interview our core and OG members. Feel free to reach out to me on Telegram if you’re interested.

We have a grants call every Friday in our server at 8AM PST open to the public.

what can the Octant team help you with?

Help us revive our legal hacks call by coding with us! Would you like legal help? Prease reach out to us!

how do you define impact for your project? what metrics are you tracking?

We hope to spend our funds on better capturing metrics. Too much of our impact goes unquantified. Important metrics we are caputing include: number of active members, growth of our newsletter, attendees at our IRL vents, how many offshoots have spun out of our DAO, how many people looking for legal services awe connect with cryptolawyers.

share your project impact metrics and results

We would love to work with you and other professionals to help us better capture metrics, plan a portion of our OP RetroPGF3 to create an anual impact report. We’ve already reached out to https://twitter.com/carl_cervone and General Magic for assistance and might begin this process as early as April 2024 circa during Stanford’s CodeX futurelaw conference.

Some thoughts about better metrics reporting: how many offshoots (e.g. Kali, TaterDAO, Clinic)? what impact do those offshoots have? how many members? how many people we help find lawyers? how many questions we answer in our Discord? how many study groups we have and how many people attend? how many IRL life events we have and how many attendees? how many people subscribe to our newsletter? for our offshoots that publish smart contracts how often those contracts are used and in what way? when we start grants-out again how do we capture metrics there?

What is a legal engineer? (for which LexDAO is the guild to hang out). We bridge the gap between wet-ink and firm-code contracts. What we believe in (as per constitution) is

Section 1.2 - Purposes. LexDAO is organized to form a club of legal engineering professionals, united to innovate and bring the traditional legal settlement layer to code, and coded agreements to the masses. We believe that everyone deserves access to justice provided in a quick and efficient manner. If legal services were easier to use, verify, and enforce, we could live in a fairer world. Distributed ledger technology offers solutions to many problems in the legal space. Our mission is to research, develop and evangelize first-class legal methods and blockchain protocols that secure rules and promises with code rather than trust. We do this by training LexDAO-certified legal engineers and building LexDAO-certified blockchain applications. We strive to balance new deterministic tools with the equitable considerations of law to better serve citizens on a cooperative and nonprofit basis for the primary and mutual benefit of its members and common good.

As practitioners, we walk the walk, not just talk the talk. In the 80s there was a TV series called the paperchase of which I’d excerpt one episode.

Contracts are fundamental to human activity as it establishes both norms (expected behaviour) but also obligations for future behaviour. As Galvin Wood points out (less trust, more truth) we have evolved from trust as a social stricture (reputation, netiquette, honor/face) towards institutional trust (freedom of press, independence of judiciary, transparency of governance). However, in recent decade, technology is encroaching on these beliefs

  • freedom of speech has been enclosed by SNS platforms into fiefdoms of reach … the hidden algorithms (supposed trade secrets) actually recommend click-baits which foster echo-chambers rather than rational/balanced discourse
  • pervasive surveillance - LittleSis will tattletale on your ad-browsing and front-run your browser search to highest bidder, privacy is NOT just the interval between when people stopped believing in omniscent God and govts noticed the market gap.
  • what’s the point of transparent windscreen if you can’t get your hands on the steering wheel? Participatory governance should NOT be which lobbyist writes the (tax) laws but to empower the average netizen to act on civic concerns.

LexDAO aims to communicate the changes that technology (in particular web3) will impact on society (DAOrganisation and human coopetition), encourage developers to think about the legal consequences of their work, and enable communities to debate/define their own socioeconomic flows (token engineering including social capital).

As a subscription-based club, we currently have a number of ideas but lack the resources to implement. Activities that we have accomplished in the past:

  • hackathon to crowdsource a submission to the Wyoming DAO LLC legislation
  • spinning out automated entity formation so you can start a (micro) company for the cost of gas (hundreds rather than thousands of $$$)
  • worked with standards bodies such as Ethereum Cat Herders to improve decision making.

Initiatives which we would like your support for including

  • legal clinic (free for non-profits) to triage #find-a-lawyer questions and provide fast mediation outcomes or referral to our members practice areas (quality checked)

  • develop thought-leadership on AI, law-in2-code (above), and legal interface into administrative procedures

  • replace onerous compliance with self/co-regulated thin rules which can be adapted to local circumstances whilst still conforming to good public policy (eg lemon problem = asymmetric information and insufficient market transparency)

drllau | LexDAO

Update at Grants/external/Octant_Epoch_4.md at main · lexDAO/Grants · GitHub

New drop by Commons Economy explaining our GitHub.

Be sure to also look at Discord as that’s the main place I’m adding info about LexDAO.

Oops, this is where you should go Discord