LexDAO April 2023 Recap
Welcome back to another exciting edition of the LexDAO newsletter. April has flown by at light speed, and many things are happening behind the scenes at LexDAO. Keep reading to see what took place this past month and what is waiting just around the bend.
What’s New in LexDAO and LexClinic
Spring has sprung and with it so have we! April has been a tumultuous month for the web3 industry as a whole, but LexDAO has not let that slow us down. Here is what we have been working on this past month and what is happening now.
LexDAO’s Gitcoin Beta [donate]
LexDAO’s Gitcoin Beta Round of funding has begun. LexDAO’s guild of legal engineers strive to provide the web3 community with education and resources on the intersection of web3 and the law. But this work cannot occur without contributions from the guild’s membership, and such contributions are funded by the community.
With Gitcoin’s Quadratic Funding matching mechanism, the number of donations, rather than the quantity of each donation, that are submitted are most important to enabling LexDAO to meet its funding goals. Your donations to our ongoing mission enable our organization to grow and sustain our mission of providing public goods. For Gitcoin Alpha, we received nearly 600 uinique donations! We hope to receive as many if not more during this round. And there are only nine days left to contribute.
Please donate today!!!
Legal Engineering Summit 2023 in Próspera [event]
Próspera, InfinitaVC, and LexDAO are co-hosting the Legal Engineering Summit 2023. The Legal Engineering Summit, which will be held in Próspera on the island of Roatan, Honduras from May 9-12, 2023, will provide attendees with an opportunity to collaborate with legal experts from multiple jurisdictions. Legal hackers, crypto lawyers, jurisdictional polymaths, and businesses are invited to attend to further the discussion on how to create better laws for web3-centric businesses to operate under at a time where many jurisdictions are becoming increasingly hostile to the web3 industry.
The Legal Engineering Summit will also host a contest for the best blockchain, digital assets, and distributed ledger legal proposals to make Próspera the destination for innovative web3 businesses and builders.
The prizes are:
1st: $1,000 in ether plus 500 Prospera Tax Credits (PTCs). PTCs can be used to pay taxes and fees in Próspera at a rate of $1 per PTC, or you can sell them on the open market.
2nd: 300 PTCs
3rd: 130 PTCs, which is just enough for one year of e-Residency in Próspera.
Teams do not need to physically attend the summit in order to enter the contest.
Check out Próspera’s press release announcing the Summit to learn more about the event and register here.
Defend Illinois personal property: petition against bill HB3479 [sign]
LexDAO Study Group has written the first of what will likely be many open letters and comments to support the crypto advocacy community with expert analysis.
Visit here to read our open letter and sign the petition. Word-of-mouth is critical at this early-stage as we grow our distribution channels. So, please share this petition with your friends and colleagues to help support our cause!
Our next initiative is to comment on the SEC’s definition of “Exchange.” If you’d like to participate in our comments, please reach out to the Study Group in Discord. Learn more about the comment period here and here.
LexDAO’s Hypercerts Financing [donate]
In LexDAO’s ongoing mission to provide public goods to the web3 community, significant effort is being devoted to finding responsible and efficient methods for rewarding the guild’s contributors. To further this goal, LexDAO is leveraging Hypercerts, a new protocol for funding, to support our contributors. Hypercerts aims to provide scalable and sustainable financing models for public goods in a way that rewards contributors for their impact on the community. Hypercerts’ retrospective funding rewards projects for the tangible, measurable impact they have created, and funders receive fractionalized ownership of the projects they fund. Learn more about LexDAO’s funding efforts from the previous Gitcoin Alpha Round on the Hypercerts app and claim your hypercert today!
LexClinic‘s Application for a Q Root Node [announcement]
LexClinic’s application for a Q root node has been approved and the node has gone live. Root nodes monitor the operations on the Q blockchain layer and ensure compliance with the Q constitution by initiating measures to enforce compliance. The collective root nodes form the root node panel, which has special voting and veto rights depending on each individual governance context. The responsibilities of Q root nodes are more fully described in the constitution. Click here to learn more about Q root nodes and how to become a root node.
LexClinic’s Creative Commons Grant [announcement]
LexClinic was awarded a Creative Commons grant to draft two research reports on the relationship between the various Creative Commons licenses and NFTs, as well as a recommendations report. As the uses of NFTs continue to expand and additional projects are brought to market, many project developers are seeking clarity on how to handle the copyright associated with the media of their NFTs. While Creative Commons licenses, especially the “CC0” license, have grown very popular among NFT projects, questions remain about whether such licenses are truly appropriate for the medium. Organizations such as a16z and IC3 have created their own sample NFT licenses and released them to the web3 community to implement into future projects. But such licenses are optimized around United States jurisdictions and legal frameworks. And using such licenses can encourage counterproductive licensing standards and fractionalization of licensing schemas, further decreasing clarity for consumers when purchasing and utilizing NFTs.
The working group will get started soon. If you'd like to sign up to volunteer, DM Kyle in Discord at bestape#3069. Applications have already been competitive, but please reach out if you're interested nevertheless.
LexDAO Co-Prompting Coding with Lobby3 [event]
LexDAO and Lobby3’s Devox Team hosted their first co-prompting coding session using ChatGPT this month. The session focused on creating prompts for ChatGPT to generate streamlit and python code. More co-prompting sessions are planned to visit our Discord to stay up to date with these events as they are planned and request specific topics be covered in future events.
LexDAO’s Website Overhaul [update]
Work continues on the upgrades to LexDAO’s website and we are excited to bring the new website to you in all of its glory. Our new and improved website will focus on delivering relevant web3 content to you with sections dedicated to research and information from LexDAO’s Study Group and membership. Construction and development of the website’s layout and features is still ongoing. So, please let us know if there are features you would like to see by visiting us on Discord and sharing your thoughts!
Law Of Code: DAO Monthly with bestape @LexDAO [audio]
The first Law Of Code: DAO Monthly episode was released this month. In this month’s episode, Jacob & Kyle go over DAO member liability. You can listen to the podcast here.
Be on the lookout in early May for episode #1’s accompanying research article — done by LexClinic law students — as well as episode #2.
RWA Twitter Spaces with Origami draws a big crowd! [audio]
A recent Twitter Space by Origami on RWA garnered significant interest on tokenizing real estate, drawing in over 2,500 listeners! Congratulations to our RWA Consortium family as they continue to lead this space! You can listen to the podcast here.
Websites as NFTS, “iNFTs,” and the legal seals initiative [article]
Kyle published an article detailing a newly developed proof of concept for "iNFTs" as a method for distributing a website's client-side files. In essence, he's suggesting websites should be published as NFTs. The method involves immutable and mutable parts, as well as onchain and IPFS parts. In addition to being automatically indexed and included in NFT marketplaces, such as OpenSea, within a wallet, or in a DAO dashboard, such as Kali, websites published as NFTS, i.e. "iNFTs," can provide their own browser experience like any other wesite. This proof of concept is aimed at a "legal seals" application, but the method itself can be applied to numerous other use-cases. There are numerous benefits to this method, including the ability to publish changes to as many different places simultaneously as possible, maintaining versioning in a well-managed and transparent manner, and creating trustless, censor-resistant and commodified website-objects. A description of the method is available here and more information can be found by looking into Bestape's mirror.
Nani is Bringing the power of AI to Wallets [project]
Nani, a Telegram bot using OpenAI, is the result of a collaboration between members of KALI and LexDAO. It is designed to help you leverage the power of a large language model for wallets and DAOs, allowing users to perform actions via text prompts. Visit the project’s GitHub to learn more and contribute!
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#3820 with any onboarding questions).
Join our bi-monthly governance calls on Wednesdays at 12pm EST in Discord!
When you are ready to join, fill out this form and check out this post for all the information that you need to apply.