Happy New Year from LexDAO!
New Year, New LexDAO
LexDAO’s members have been hard at work throughout the end of the year deploying a number of key initiatives for the DAO to lead us into 2024. The first and most important task has been for us to fulfill on our promise to our members to provide an updated web3 native token as the framework of our membership. The second has been to finalize the Member Directory with a new php interface to allow lawyers and professionals to build profiles in our network. The third has been continuing work on refining the website to build upon our existing design and polish its structure so that we can accelerate our growth as an organization.
In the background, there are also a number of initiatives at play which we encourage members (and anyone who may be interested) to participate in. The Communications Committee has continued publishing great and engaging content on legal engineering topics. Our Operating Committe has been hard at work closing out the year's finances. The Grants Committee has continued to explore partnerships and funding opportunities to keep the DAO treasury afloat. We've kicked off conversations about LexDAO formally creating a peer-review journal and have begun to line up speaking engagements to bring the ever-popular Study Group back into the fold. After months of a bear-market, we are hopeful that a strong recovery is just around the corner. To kick off the new year, we thought it would be helpful to take a look back at what we have been building, as well as what we will keep developing, for LexDAO’s members and the web3 community.
Token Standard
After searching far and wide, we did, in fact, find an on-chain Member Card solution for the DAO to utilize for the foreseeable future. Historically, the DAO has operated on a variety of platforms. The last time we had a working token was in 2022 with an ERC-721 contract created by our former operator Jared Cohen. While these tokens were an incredible first go at deploying on chain, by 2023 they were in need of a refresh.
Over the course of the year, we explored countless vendors while rigorously researching home grown options to create a new ERC-721 contract. After tirelessly searching for months, we came across Unlock Protocol which has built its business entirely on time-based NFTs. Unlock allows us to build all of our token requirements into verified contracts and facilitate a smooth checkout for our members to self-mint. As an added benefit it is also open-sourced, which goes hand in hand with LexDAO's operating philosophy.
The token comes with a number of key benefits and meets the vast majority of our baseline specifications. All of our research and specifications for this project can be found here. For starters, the token allows our members to self-mint using an intuitive checkout flow, pay with crypto assets, and even purchase using a credit card if necessary. The token is also time based so our tokens expire exactly one year from moment a user pays their fee. At the end of the year, these tokens will not burn, so the member can keep their card in their wallet forever as a momento to their time in LexDAO. It also facilitates renewals so that users can renew their memberships indefinitely. The tokens are non-transferrable, which is critical to the philosophy of one member, one vote and to the idea of continuing to build a professional organization. The NFT metadata is comprehensive allowing us to include references to all kinds of attributes and links to make onboarding easier, contracts clearer, and build credibility with new prospects. The contract governing the tokens is also updateable, making it simple for us to administer the token as the base infrastructure for future engineering projects for our network. Lastly, we've deployed on Polygon, a well-respected and low cost Layer 2 chain, to minimize the financial burden of this infrastructure and create a robust ecosystem on top of this foundation.
The artwork for the membership token is an homage to both the origins of LexDAO as well as the future of our DAO. Using artwork created originally for our guild in the early years of the DAO along with custom designs made for our website by Andres Dovales, a long-time DAO member and core contributor, we painstakingly recreated our original logo and then overlayed it with a fresh palette that represents both the past, present, and future of LexDAO as the leader in Legal Engineering. We hope that our members and the community will appreciate the hard work that went into the design of the NFT artwork and the care we took to preserve the DAO's roots.
This 721 token is only the beginning as we work on a conceptual framework of the DAOs operational design. We have aspirations of being a model non-profit organization stitched together as a guild of contributing organizations and individuals all working to improve society. Using the underlying concepts of on-chain token standards and contracts, we have been hard at work trying to make this technology accessible, practical, and user-friendly. As part of our organizational design project, we've been creating a conceptual map of how a DAO network infrastructure is planned, built, and executed to make web3 a concept grounded in a practical business use case.
We are also exploring the revamp of our Legal Engineering certificate, known as LEETH. This will help us to create a peer-group of Legal Engineers that have demonstrated their proficiency in the practice of web3 law, engineering, or both. At the moment, most of our efforts are centered around compiling old contracts for the previously minted LEETH Tokens, researching the legacy qualifications, and putting together a working group to help build V2 of this important DAO offering. As we continue to build our technical chops, we hope to be a sounding board, forum, and industry resource to companies and individuals as they embark on building solutions in this still nascent space.
Member Directory
After many months we have finished a ground-up rebuild of our member directory to display custom member-profiles as well as to contact people directly through the web interface. We've connected this to the member signup flow to make it more seamless to apply to the guild and to be listed in a professional platform. This project will have a number of enhancements in the coming months as we look at various ways to incorporate certifications and token roles to support the concept of reputation and trust. For now, we hope to continue to build value in LexDAO by making it easier to find trusted professionals in this dynamic web3 environment. The member directory is currently a free resource open to all current members and we encourage you to sign up. In the near future we will explore it as a paid enhancement to the membership card to help drive revenue to continue to support the project and the DAO as a whole.
Website
The website has been in beta for a few months and much of its development was put on hold to work through the connection of the directory and calendar integration. While we still have work to do on the LexDAO Calendar, we have connected the site to the member checkout. As we get further into the year, the hope is that we can begin to build new structures on top of this foundation to enhance the value our public profile brings to the community. Anson Parker, for example, is currently working on an integration with Lit Protocol to help with gating access through site resources using our member token.
We hope the website will continue to be a resource for the DAO in the coming months and look forward to members providing input and contributions to this project.
Get Involved!
LexDAO is always looking for new members! If you are interested in the work we are doing:
Check out our Discord and ask some questions (feel free to DM our Assistant Operator Cimply (Cimply#3820) with any onboarding questions).
Join our bi-monthly governance calls on Wednesdays at 12pm EST in Discord!
When you are ready to join, head to lexdao.org/membership and become part of our growing community of legal engineers.