DAO Model Law

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= "The goal of this model law is to assist governments in crafting their own DAO laws, so as to recognize full or partial legal personality to DAOs".

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Description

COALA:

"the DAO Model Law series will reflect on COALA’s current endeavor to draft a model law for networked organisations that many in the blockchain ecosystem refer to as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs). We are looking to engage with blockchain practitioners — technical and legal professionals — as we push through the uncharted territory of recognizing Decentralized Autonomous Organizations as legal persons. We will set out the issues to be addressed and solutions proposed in more detail in a series of blog posts in the following weeks." (https://medium.com/coala/the-dao-model-law-68e5360971ea)


Discussion

COALA:

DAOs are already a reality.

Since the first proto-versions appeared back in 2014 and later on the Ethereum blockchain in 2015, there have been hundreds of attempts to establish specific types of networked organisations known as DAOs, whose operations are distributed across the nodes of a blockchain network, and whose governance is defined or, more generally, administered by the code deployed on that network. However, as things stand right now, DAOs cannot legally own assets, enter into contracts, sue and be sued, and collaborators may face unknown and unlimited liability. For those building DAOs aimed at interacting with the off-chain world, this poses a major problem.

The goal of this model law is to assist governments in crafting their own DAO laws, so as to recognize full or partial legal personality to DAOs. The objective is to endow them with specific legal rights — and obligations — without requiring them to register or conform to traditional corporate law rules, so long as they satisfy the relevant legal provisions through technological means (e.g., “technological guarantees” afforded by blockchain infrastructure). Those technological means should provide legal protections equivalent to those underpinning traditional corporate legal forms, while taking account of the new opportunities of blockchain technology. At its core, this model law maps the various policy goals underpinning traditional corporate law rules, with a series of technological guarantees that can be regarded as “functional equivalents” to those rules." (https://medium.com/coala/the-dao-model-law-68e5360971ea)


More information

  • Please do not hesitate to reach out to us at [email protected] if you would like to learn more about the work we are doing and/or contribute to the DAO Model Law project.