A companion blog post to this explains what goes into where to set up a company. But once a business is set up in a certain places that's not the final word on what laws and countries matter. Businesses need to be careful to try not to have their activities be regulated by places that they don't intend. In order to do that they need to be mindful of their actions, server location(s), who they do business with (along the way to serving their customers), their contracts, and where the people who run their business are located. These are all factors that lawyers can advise on and companies can e ..read more

One of the most common questions I get from founding teams of blockchain projects is: where should we set up our business? People expect this to be an easy answer. And there is a common answer: Cayman foundation company (holding company) that owns a BVI corporation (which issues token). But there's a lot more to being a lawyer than suggesting what most people do. And not everyone will be well-served by following this path ..read more

At the top of this page is an interesting experiment in using LLMs (large language models, like ChatGPT) to explore the content of a library of content. In this case, my blog. It scans across all of the blog posts and tries to figure out which ones are relevant, then use the relevant ones to construct an answer to the query/task. It's a great way for people to find content that I might have written years ago, or convert what I've written into easier to understand language. It's much better than keywords for finding certain content, and it synthesizes the content to smaller summaries for the re ..read more

The Ethereum Enterprise Alliance has written an extensive guide on DeFi risks: https://entethalliance.org/specs/drafts/defi-risks/20230116/#sec-compliance-risks. Below is a screenshot of the section on legal & compliance risks, which I think is worth mentioning because it's a great example of the views that many have in the crypto space. This section is considerably lighter than that of accounting, even though accounting and tax risks are rarely the reasons why projects shut down or don't get off the ground. So far as I know, no one has gone to jail for having poor accounting controls, but ..read more

Canada's provincial securities regulators have approved certain companies to sell cryptocurrency. These platforms have the highest standard of regulation that applies, and are the least risky way for Canadians to buy cryptocurrency. For Ontario residents, the Ontario Securities Commission maintains a list of the approved platforms: https://www.osc.ca/en/industry/registration-and-compliance/registered-crypto-asset-trading-platforms ..read more

I've been a “crypto lawyer” for a decade now. So I did a double-take when I looked at the label on the pasta sauce I'd just eaten: a blockchain authentication label! Blockchains out in the real world. The above picture is the actual pasta sauce I ate. And the link on the QR code goes to this page: https://blockchain.authentico.it/q/?query=f00d00000000000100000000018e7bef3193d4d4b939f8150d73a11016e86fbe&show_cookies=1 ..read more

Craig Wright is an individual who claimed to be the rightful owner of billions of dollars of bitcoin, which he said he lost the keys to when he deleted his files. He wanted the crypto back, but without the keys this should be impossible. Mr. Wright came up with a rather unique strategy, that the rest of this blog explains, which should be studied by everyone who writes code for public blockchains or manages a protocol. So far as I know, Mr. Wright is the first person to seriously attempt this method. The basic idea is to ask a court to require the developers to change the code so that bitcoins ..read more

The 20th century saw dirt roads turn into bitumen and concrete highways around the world. Massive government road building projects (and expropriation) constructed streets and highways across the western world and beyond. These roads were all billed to the taxpayer, with the promise being a massive increase in transportation and thus the economy. It was the century of gasoline and diesel. But this approach has been tapped out. New road construction seems almost like a relic as investors push NVIDIA shares beyond the trillion dollar mark and AI fever grips the business world. Fibre optic lines ..read more

Yesterday I was speaking with a junior lawyer about blogging and explained how I write my posts. They asked me if I'd ever blogged about how I blog, and apparently the answer is no, I haven't ever written a blog post about how I write blog posts. This post explains my custom software for blogging, why I wrote my own blogging software a decade ago, and the advantages of using a static website. Custom Blogging Software ..read more

What would it take for DAOs to overtake traditional corporations as the main way that Internet-based businesses are organized? It's easy to take shots at DAOs but this blog post looks at what it would take for this transformation to actually happen. We're certainly not even close to a world where most tech is built and delivered by DAOs, but there are hints that DAOs can be used for quite a bit of what's currently done by traditional companies. They're starting to be used for funding scientific research or creating digital dollar equivalents. In another sense of the term, some major blockchain ..read more