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"This white paper offers the first comprehensive overview and explanation of legal wrappers available to DAOs. It observes how the qualitative features of DAOs-including their dispersed and fluid memberships, and blockchain-based governance-are unanticipated by legal wrappers modeled after 20th century corporations, nonprofits and partnerships. It then surveys a diverse range of wrappers available to DAOs, and highlights how thoughtful legal engineering can help mitigate frictions that arise when attempting to wrap established legal forms around DAOs and DAO operations. To demonstrate, the white paper proceeds through a variety of fact scenarios spanning protocol, media, collector, social, and philanthropic DAOs to illustrate how wrappers might be employed to protect DAO participants from unlimited liability, optimize tax treatment, engage in contractual off-chain transactions, and enable compliance with key regulatory expectations."

A bill to recognize decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) as companies has passed through the Senate Committee stage in Wyoming. The legislation would make it easier and cheaper to set up a DAO and give legitimacy to many crypto-asset projects. DAOs are entities that operate through smart contracts, with financial transactions and rules encoded on a blockchain, effectively removing the need for a central governing authority. The Wyoming DAO bill now goes to a vote in the Senate, and then the House. If all is well, it's then signed into law. https://legiscan.com/WY/bill/SF0038/2021

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) sued Ooki DAO, a decentralized autonomous organization, last week. The CFTC alleged Ooki DAO was offering leveraged and margin trading products without registering as a Futures Commission Merchant (FCM), a legal requirement in the U.S. The complaint is a dagger into the belief that decentralization is a defense against regulation. Admittedly, it's not the first time we've seen U.S. regulators indicate that decentralization really isn't a defense, but because of the way the CFTC has worded its complaint it seems especially concerning. The short version is that, in the CFTC's view, every single voting participant in a DAO can and should be held individually liable for any illicit activity conducted by the DAO.

It's a mistake to defend DAOs on the grounds that code is free speech. Some code is speech, but not all code is speech. And code can also directly affect the world. DAOs, which are in essence autonomous golems, made from code rather than clay, make this distinction especially stark. This will become even more important as robots become more capable and prevalent. Robots are even more obviously golems than DAOs are, performing actions in the physical world. Should their code enjoy a safe harbor from the law? What if robots, like DAOs, are designed to obey only their initial instructions, however unlawful-and refuse all further updates or commands? Assuming that code is free speech and only free speech, and ignoring its functional purpose, will at best tangle the law up in knots. Tying free speech arguments to the cause of DAOs like Tornado Cash imperils some of the important free speech victories that were won in the past. But the risks for everyone might be even greater if that argument wins. A world where democratic governments are unable to enforce their laws is not a world where civic spaces or civil liberties will thrive.

The U.S. state of Wyoming has officially recognized decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) as a new type of limited liability company, or LLC. DAOs are governed by the terms of smart contracts, without the hierarchical control structure seen in traditional companies. The new law solves several important legal issues, such as joint-and-several liability for all participants in a DAO, provided it is considered a partnership by court.

"Wyoming has approved the first legally recognized decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) in the United States. The American CryptoFed DAO received notice from the Wyoming Secretary of State's office on Tuesday recognizing it as a legal entity. The American CryptoFed DAO was established by mobile banking solutions provider mSHIFT on July 1, 2021. The project describes its mission as promoting a two-token economy that is immune from inflationary or deflationary influences."

This article discusses decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) and the potential legal liabilities that could be raised by this application of blockchain technology. A DAO is an organization that's self-governing and that isn't influenced by outside forces: its software operates on its own, with its bylaws immutably written on the blockchain, not controlled by its creators. DAOs are formed by groups of like-minded individuals with specific projects and goals in mind... A DAO purely manages funds: in itself it does not have the capabilities to build a product, write code or develop hardware.

The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) has filed a lawsuit against Ooki DAO in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The complaint alleged that the Decentralized Autonomous Organization (DAO) was an unincorporated association involved in unlawful activity. This complaint has broad implications for the crypto industry. There are now 2,276 DAOs, which control about $10 billion of crypto in a wide array of blockchain-based financial tools.

"Collaboratively governed and code-driven, decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) are engaged in nothing less than an experiment to reimagine how we connect, collaborate and create. Although DAOs today manage billions of dollars' worth of assets, engage millions of contributors and operate across industries as diverse as finance and philanthropy, basic questions regarding operations, governance, law and policy are only just beginning to be addressed by policy-makers, regulators and entrepreneurs. The result of a collaboration involving more than 100 experts spanning the public and private sectors, the DAO Toolkit provides resources for developers, policy-makers and other stakeholders seeking to engage with the DAO ecosystem."

What is a DAO? DAO stands for Decentralized Autonomous Organization. But what is it really? Is it just code? Is it a business? Is it a living thing? Smart contracts united?

The purpose of this paper is to identify a number of taxation, entity formation and operational issues pertaining to Decentralized Autonomous Organizations ("DAOs") and to suggest a domestic entity structure capable of addressing such issues, including filing and paying U.S. taxes, opening an entity bank account, signing legal agreements and limiting liability for DAO members.

"The upper chamber of Wyoming's legislature has passed a bill that, if approved, would clear the way for decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, to become incorporated under state law. The 28-2 vote took place on Wednesday, public records show, and was sent to the State House of Representatives the same day. On Thursday, the bill was formally introduced and transferred to that chamber's Minerals, Business & Economic Development committee."

IMF staff, in their concluding statement of their 2023 Article IV consultation mission, expressed concerns about the Fintech initiatives of the Republic of the Marshall Islands (RMI). These included the enactment of the DAO Act and the move to start registration of decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and the potential launch of a stablecoin. Concerns included capacity constraints and questions regarding the understanding of the authorities to adequately regulate and supervise these initiatives. IMF staff also encouraged the authorities to expeditiously enact the SOV Repeal Bill. (In 2018 the RMI legislature passed the SOV Act making the RMI government-backed SOV crypto-asset a second legal tender, in addition to the US dollar, about which IMF staff had expressed reservations.)

"DeFi and DEXs have recently attracted much attention. Uniswap raised in October 2022 a $165 million Series B funding round that valued the company at $1.7 billion, and DEXs globally are profiting from the hit that confidence in CEXs suffered following the FTX fallout. We provide in this first article a general overview of DeFi, DEXs and DAOs, focusing on Uniswap V3. In the second part of this article, we will cover a more technical analysis of price discovery and on-chain/off-chain arbitrage opportunities."

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) is a group organized around a mission that coordinates through a shared set of rules enforced on a blockchain.

Decentralized autonomous organizations are entities that operate through smart contracts. Its financial transactions and rules are encoded on a blockchain, effectively removing the need for a central governing authority - hence the descriptors "decentralized" and "autonomous."

"The DAO legislation further bolsters Wyoming's reputation in the industry as "Blockchain Valley." Notably, it follows Wyoming's decision in 2019 to charter special purpose depository institutions (SPDIs), enabling digital asset companies to operate as depository banks and custodians in the state and beyond, with access to the federal payments infrastructure. These developments should help promote blockchain business development across the United States."

Crypto trading platform ShapeShift will begin winding down its operations as a formal company, and hand over its legacy to a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) controlled by holders of its FOX token. Currently employing 65 people, ShapeShift will have no employees, no bank accounts and no CEO in somewhere between 4 and 12 months' time.

PieDAO, the decentralized organization building diversified token pools on the Balancer protocol, announced the mainnet release of its USD++ pool on Tuesday. The pool combines several of the top USD-pegged stablecoins into one tradable token. It's another example of a creative use case of the rapidly growing Balancer protocol-and of the expanding universe of ideas DAOs are working to address. The USD++ pool will contain Maker DAI, Synthetix sUSD, Tether TUSD, and Coinbase USDC.

Booming demand for stablecoins in DeFi's yield farming landscape is breaking DAI's U.S. dollar peg. MakerDAO's DAI, which uses Ethereum and other stablecoins as collateral to maintain the peg, is trading above its targeted peg, has been consistently trading above $1 since mid-March. The community responded by setting all rates to zero, but the demand for DAI is so extreme that even these zero rates don't make a difference. MakerDAO's community is debating some tweaks to its monetary policy to restore the peg, though Maker's creator believes the only long-term solution is adding additional, varied collateral to the DAO.