Subscribe to Dane Lund
Receive the latest updates directly to your inbox.
Studying the Optimism Collective
Disclosure: You may already be a winner of the $OP token sweepstakes. I am serving as a delegate for the Optimism Token House.
Finding and Vetting Web3 Attorneys: Five Lessons
One of the common challenges our founders face is choosing the right attorneys. Few attorneys have focused on the issues that apply to Web3 to the extent that they can legitimately claim to be experts. With the broadening market appreciation of the importance of decentralized technologies, the attorneys who have developed public personas for Web3 advocacy are often oversubscribed for their services or quickly hired in-house. There are stellar Web3 lawyers who operate within law firms or who run their own practices, but they are difficult to find without a focused search.
Getting Past Maybe: A Call for Forward-Thinking Lawyers
Legal education mires its pupils in the netherworld of anti-probability. The goal of a legal education is to equip students with the ability to see multiple sides to an argument and to spot issues that could arise based on a pattern of facts. The process can make lawyers wildly creative: a lawyer can find latent flaws in what appears to be the most bulletproof plan, which can enable the lawyer to outwit adversaries and avoid pitfalls. The Achilles heel of the legal profession is that lawyers are trained to spot issues, not to weight their likelihood of occurring. The result is that many lawyers become overwhelmed by the landscape of potential risks and are unable to find a high conviction path forward.
DAO Governance Primer: The Initial State
A DAO is a mechanism of governance enabled by smart contract execution of tokenized commands. Tokens send signals; smart contracts interpret those signals and deliver an outcome. In its most basic form, a DAO is naive: it is not necessarily flat, nor necessarily democratic. In order for a DAO to form, a group of people must agree on the initial architecture and answer: who holds tokens, what rights do tokens create, and what smart contracts exist at the beginning? Answering these questions and committing them to code creates the initial state, the genesis block of the DAO.