NEAR Legal Guild Launches to Bridge Law and Crypto
NEAR has a new community member: NEAR Legal.
Born out of a Guild program, the NEAR Legal Guild is a community that aims to support projects and communities in the NEAR ecosystem, along with any others that design solutions on the protocol. Its main mission is to foster lines of communication with the NEAR community, identifying areas of legal interest and defining novel solutions to new problems.
In interacting with different NEAR developers, we quickly realized that there is a firm base of knowledge on certain topics. But many other developers haven’t yet been able to identify the key issues facing their app.
In both cases, the Legal Guild is here to help.
Our multidisciplinary team is experienced in various legal areas. This gives the Legal Guild a different structure than your classic law firm, including:
- Legislation: crypto framework in different jurisdictions
- Anti-money Laundering / Know Your Customer
- Due Diligence
- Tokenization
- Privacy & Data Protection
- Intellectual Property for crypto-assets (NFTs and digital assets)
- Software licensing
- Cybersecurity
Our decentralized workflow, combined with our involvement in a wide array of NEAR projects, allows our team to lead the creation of a varied legal catalogue. Again, all of this will be at the service of community needs.
The Legal Guild’s value to the NEAR Community
Blockchain and Web3 technology — specifically DLTs (Distributed Ledger Technologies) — currently hold a predominant position among the world’s most disruptive technologies. For many, these decentralized technologies parallel the paradigm shift that followed the Internet’s creation and led to Web 2.0. DLT’s are already quite advanced compared to the underlying software that supports various types of crypto-assets. With new technologies come new services and areas of expertise.
We at the Legal Guild are convinced that Web3 technologies herald legal disruption. New players using novel tools and technologies will play a decisive role in this emerging paradigm. New services and expertise will be vital in developing and applying unique alternatives to traditional models of legal service provision.
DLTs are one such tool capable of generating new business models, and they can be applied to a wide range of solutions like Smart Legal Contracts. Capable of automating legally-binding relationships, these contracts execute clauses as code when a condition is met. Similarly, new entities known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) are organized around the will of members instead of a centralized authority, autonomously operating in the market as a kind of “assimilated legal personality”.
For a better understanding of the legal nature and problems of their use, we recommend our analysis on Smart Contractsand DAOs.
Early steps in Law 3.0
Blockchain’s value to the legal industry is just emerging, with a range of new, novel tools being created.
Take Smart Contracts, for example — an arguably difficult area to regulate. Each day it seems We have an increasing number of solutions for this new catalog of challenges, particularly since law is generally one step behind technological innovation. From a legal perspective, there is currently a race to adapt existing rules to new challenges with initiatives like: the EU’s proposed regulation of crypto-assets MiCa; the EU’s digital euro proposal; and numerous sandboxes at the national level in several countries.
All of these challenges and difficulties lay bare a clear reality: legislators feel more urgency than ever to define solutions at the regulatory level.
“Law as Code” and “Code as Law”
Blockchain technology reinforces the tendency to rely on code (more than on law itself) to regulate individual actions and transactions, all of which are recorded on the blockchain. DLTs, Smart Contracts, and DAOs allow a new category of “regulation by code” to exist, which in turn promotes a new way of understanding the law.
As these tools mature and take shape from a legal perspective, more contractual rules applicable to this type of relationship will appear. The law could then evolve toward something more like code than pure “classic law,” like new contractual rules more assimilated to technical requirements than traditional legal rules.
When smart contracts are implemented on a blockchain, their execution is not performed on a central server, but is rather distributed amongst the network of nodes. Blockchain-based smart contracts are therefore more sophisticated than traditional means of technological regulation in that they qualify as computer software code which is both autonomous — as it does not depend on any given third party to operate, and independent — as it cannot be controlled by anyone. (De Filippi and Wright, 2015)
Law is intentionally ambiguous. Its purpose is to be easily applied to the greatest number of situations. With DLTs, we will face problems such as decentralization, automatic conditional execution, blockchain-based devices that operate under their rules, or the rigidity of those technical rules. These situations and any unforeseen ones will require different treatment and interpretation of rules and law.
Implementing an automatic execution of “code as law” won’t be easy or simple. We just aren’t currently prepared or equipped to cope with the complexity and unpredictability of human behavior.
The Legal Guild works every day to help NEAR projects identify their primary needs and define solutions for them.
You can contact the Guild through our Telegram channel, or through the contact forms for projects and collaborators on our website nearlegal.com.
Join NEAR’s community:
Telegram: https://t.me/cryptonear
Discord: https://discord.com/invite/UY9Xf2k
Twitter: @NEAR_Blockchain & @NEARProtocol
