Introducing The lexDAO Registry: a TLDR approach to smart contracting
⚖️ Attorneys, welcome to your Crypto|💰| Economic Sandbox! ⚔️
We could all do better as attorneys to seize opportunities staring us blankly in the face.
Frankly, the once illustrious path of legal scholarship and working for The Guild has lost a good deal of its sheen.
But there is no reason why the usual trust-scripting and dispute-resolving functions of attorneys cannot keep pace with innovation.
Somewhat unfortunately, while law firms wring hands over moving IT infra past early 2000s and pay unlicensed law graduates 190k starting salaries to keep up with the jones(day)es, cypherpunks are programming digital courts and trying to shave legal costs down to dust.
If you were a law firm client, controlled outside legal spend and were facing your own mounting pressures of automation, would you really hesitate to slash richly-appointed, unapologetic services if something better was a click away? One must wonder….
Among trends purportedly nipping at our heels, programmable blockchains such as Ethereum promise to radically alter deal settlement costs by utilizing, among other internet-native quirks, transactional scripts that can serve traditional trusted roles such as escrow agent and payment forwarder as they are so instructed and with magnitudes greater certainty and cost-efficiency than their banking counterparts (…unlike a human escrow agent commanded by, say, a paper contract, Ethereum agents don’t sleep or ragequit on their duties…).
Ethereum can therefore serve as an exciting and timely sandbox for attorneys to both learn about, and more importantly, take a leadership role in, technology trends that may come to define how we practice in the next decade over assets and deals that increasingly migrate online.
Sound good?
Well, then come meet The lexDAO Registry, a highly streamlined, “TLDR” approach for attorney smart contracting and online dispute resolution powered by Ethereum transactional scripts. (What?)
I am trying to make it stupidly simple to become blockchain-qualified and add new edges to your laweryly tookit! Oh, and maybe make some bank too 💰~
Brief Background
The TLDR smart contract was written by ~yours truly~, a corporate attorney by trade, and Ethereum (Solidity) programmer by aspiration 🤷♂️.
In addition to hosting scripts for Digital Escrow and Covenants, TLDR is governed as a “DAO” among its maintainers through gaming and cryptoeconomic features, a cooperative format well enunciated by Manuel Araoz in February 2019, “Designing Digital Life and Death” 👾💀.
As it happens, this format resembles the existing schemes of private and semi-adversarial governance among attorney that currently operate The Guild by filing bar complaints and seeking redress for professional lapses that devalue all of our collective efforts.
Here, the initial TLDR code was reviewed by Kelvin Fichter, with such audit available here. The current deployment reflecting this audit and other recent changes can be viewed here as TLDR v0.2.
The following sections will serve as a breezy overview of how TLDR comes together for attorneys and similar deal-makers:
lexDAO: Governance & Cryptoeconomics
As noted above, lexDAO implements a reputation scheme policed by admitted members identified as lexScribes on Ethereum.
Currently, the lexDAO address registers new lexScribes after determining their qualifications to serve. There are immediate plans to transfer this role to an Aragon DAO agent program in order to distribute this admission function among more addresses. We currently have a beta-tester fellowship group that you can monitor here:
Every admitted lexScribe receives “1” reputation point on registering with the lexDAO program.
This initial balance reflects their probationary status in lexDAO, as having “0” reputation bars lexScribes from writing new content and earning fees for arbitrating disputes.
Each lexScribe can repair or slash 1 point of other lexScibe reputation each day (thus, new scribes are on “thin ice,” as it were, and all should stay “awake”).
As a buffer and marker of progress, each lexScribe can get up to “3” reputation points reflecting their total “three strikes you’re out” balance in the event that they receive complaints from other lexScribes.
As long as you have reputation > 0, you are eligible to work on TLDR.
TLDR reputation can be fully restored by a lexScribe every 90 days by submitting 0.1 ether (Ξ) to lexDAO or burning 10 LEX tokens minted by TLDR for their work.
Practically, the status of being a reputable lexScribe allows an address to register templates within TLDR that can be used to wrap legal references into digital escrow transactions, as well as settle related disputes:
In the event that a lexScript (indexed by lexID) is imported into such escrow deal by Ethereum users, the authoring address will receive the lexRate amount they recorded for their template 💸.
For example, a 1 wETH deal that imports lexID #4 ‘retainer’ language might pay 0.25% for each related payment withdrawal transaction from TLDR escrow, as seen here:
For context, LexID #4 references the following IPFS hash of a retainer agreement (legible here) to wrap an escrow transaction denominated in wETH in human-readable terms:
As it happens in this escrow example, such retainer template fees are directed to the OpenESQ LLC/DAO vault being run with Aragon DAO template code 🦅 (#stackingwei), 0.25% for each transaction derived thereby 🕺.
Further, and for more fun incentives, we can also see how arbitrating a disputed escrow amount can reward a lexScribe instantly⚡:
entry of award directly on raw etherscan dApp:
settlement of escrow value:
LEX Token
Each lexScribe can earn 1 LEX token native to TLDR for each lexScript they register to wrap escrow transactions, digital covenants, or upon arbitrating an escrow dispute.
As noted, LEX tokens can be exchanged into TLDR to renew reputation points every quarter. Further, the TLDR program requires that an arbitrating lexScribe maintain 5 LEX in their account balance for this work privilege. There are also contemplated use cases for LEX involving lexDAO representation, which we welcome input on!
Want an easy start to TLDR smart contracting?
Try digitally signing this form of “Digital Organization Covenant” (DOC) which has an IPFS hash embedded into LexID #3: ✒️ ✋
To do so, click this link to raw TLDR etherscan dApp write functions (very bottom, 24 — signDC), input “3” as reference for lexScript lexID, and then append yourself to an orderly pool of DAO participants:
Huzzah!
As we develop a user-friendly (d)application and interface for attorneys to access and manage lexDAO / TLDR, we welcome input on our code and related documentation: https://github.com/lexDAO/TLDR 💪
If you would like to learn more about becoming a TLDR user or contributing lexScribe, please reach out to us at info@lexdao.club 🖖
Update 12/31:
We have recently deployed a new instance of TLDR smart contract here, and have also built a dApp to manage registered escrows at lexdao.club (BETA)!
