LegalBlock… Who are we? Where are we going?

LegalBlock is a decentralized-driven legal community promoting Collective Wisdom.

Albi Rodriguez Jaramillo
LegalBlock
Published in
4 min readFeb 20, 2018

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We are aware that no jurisdiction has all the answers to the legal and regulatory questions that are being derived from the Blockchain ecosystem. With LegalBlock, we seek to exchange knowledge throughout the participation of lawyers from different jurisdictions in discussions and analysis. We design activities approaching both legal and regulatory issues, as well as the legal implications of technological solutions that allow self-regulation and functionalities of legal work in Blockchain.

We believe in the statement “The Whole is GREATER than THE SUM OF ITS PARTS.” We support the idea that having different visions and perspectives will enrich knowledge, which eventually will become The Whole. As of now, we count more than 300 lawyers from more than 35 different jurisdictions, linked to Blockchain projects.

Our work dynamic starts by pointing out general Topics, perform specific Activities related to those topics, and delivering a Report as a final outcome. In this way, we aim to contribute not only to our members’ intellectual enrichment, but also to the Blockchain ecosystem.

Despite the fact that we have not yet created a token, and won’t carry out an ICO/TGE process in the short-to-mid term, we do consider that the existence of a Token as an incentive mechanism within the community can be validated. As part of our evaluation, we are focusing on research along with developers from the Ethereum community who have been working on a new model of incentives called “Token Curation Registry.” TCR is a model created by Mike Goldin with ConsenSys and could be a powerful implementation for curation and reputation of our list of lawyers. For that reason, we are leaning to propose the creation of a token for our community.

Besides this first Layer of incentive, The Token would be distributed to the members according to their participation as an incentive, and would allow the community to vote the proposed activities, the reports that derive from these activities, challenge candidates who join the community, as well as the reputation of the members based on their participation and the quality of their contributions. This incentive mechanism will lay the foundations for the development of information and profiles duly cured, according to meritocracy and the value of the content contributed, experience, reputation.

Our Vision is to bring a community of lawyers/professionals to the Blockchain ecosystem, those whose reputation and references do not come from a personal definition or self-promotion, but from collective validation of their quality work given by knowledgeable members in Blockchain legal matters.

We envision a future in which the teams of developers, projects, organizations and corporations can evaluate LegalBlock members’ profiles according to this curated data. And in turn, those participants in the ecosystem can use the information available to vote on the quality of the results provided to generate feedback on the level of reputation of our members. A sort of “Legal Think Tank” for the Blockchain ecosystem.

During this first phase, our intention is making a call to the largest number of initiatives and legal related working groups in Blockchain, enabling LegalBlock members to evaluate initiatives and projects, such as Brooklyn Project, OpenLaw, LegalHackers, Agrello, AccordProject, among many others. Any local Blockchain initiative of work or study in legal matters may be put to the consideration of the members, who will eventually decide who becomes part of the LegalBlock community.

Being an open and decentralized-driven community, our role as founders is as catalysts and coordinators of the processes. The community will belong to the members, who will earn Tokens according to their level of contribution of work and knowledge.

Our first Activity, Protocols and Self-Regulation, took place on December 21, 2017 as part of the analysis of the Token Sale model proposed by Vitalik Buterin, Jason Teutsch and Christopher Brown: The Interactive Coin Offering Protocol. We held a Q & A session with the presence of Jason Teutsch, and Christopher Brown interacting with the members of our community, which will culminate with an Activity Report. We intend to generate an Activity per month or every two months with a tangible outcome that is valuable to the ecosystem.

If you are a lawyer, academic, law student, regulator or simply a Blockchain enthusiast interested in legal and regulatory issues, you are cordially invited to participate. Everything happens in our Slack, and you are welcome to join here: Slack LegalBlock.

Learn more about LegalBlock by reading our Conceptual Paper

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DISCLAIMER: Blockchain is a disruptive technology that introduces several doubts about its legal nature. LegalBlock aims at being an open forum in which its members and invitees can share views and comments on such technology and its impact on different legal systems. However, the views and discussions expressed in LegalBlock are merely personal and do NOT constitute legal advice of any sort and do NOT necessarily reflect those of the LegalBlock.

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Albi Rodriguez Jaramillo
LegalBlock

Lawyer, Blockchain & DLT consultant, Financial Inslusion Specialist, Blockchain & Digital Transformation Lecturer