86%
average score over 6 application evaluations
Legal engineers providing open-source coding of legal agreements and smart contracts, fostering efficient, fair justice access through education, tools, and DAO governance. Seeking project-specific funding for general operations and public good initiatives.

"Law is a public good. If law isn't a public good, all public goods are in threat."

contributions

LexDAO is a club of legal engineering professionals united to bring the traditional legal settlement layer to code and coded agreements to the masses. We believe that everyone deserves access to justice in a quick and efficient manner. If legal services were easier to use, verify and enforce, we could live in a fairer world.

LexDAO organizes sophisticated conversations and educational materials to help orient people around how to build in the new and evolving space. LexDAO focuses on Code is Law applications where practical legal theory is embedded into smart contracts, applications and networks. The efforts we undertake are all in the spirit of public goods and services. Many of our projects spin out into standalone tools or services; some examples include KaliDAO and Smart Invoice.

get involved

  • Signup to our mailing list https://lexdao.substack.com !

  • Join the conversation (you don't need to be a member!) at https://discord.gg/dAySQQPPsD

  • Join our membership at https://lexdao.org/membership

impact

We've done many projects over the years, and recently got a grant big enough to start publishing comprehensive annual reports!

Examples of high-impact are Real World Asset "RWA" offshoot projects like Tater and Cougar, using our offshoot project Kali for the DAO OS. These Kali RWA project are making important strides in web3 real estate. Like many other on-chain DAO deployers, Kali is the culmination of LexDAO Projects related to onchain governance, arbitration and corporate structures. The smart contract code is greatly simplified which makes it easier to read and secure assets on-chain.

Another example is Smart Invoice, a tool by a 3rd party built on LexDAO's public-good lawtech LexLocker that is designed to provide web3 workers with cryptocurrency invoicing, escrow and arbitration capabilities. As with most LexDAO affiliated solutions, Smart Invoice is built in an open source framework so that other developers can build on top of its code. It is designed for clients and contractors to make the facilitation of crypto-payments easier to use and safer for both parties involved.

Community members don't strictly need to pay to join, since LexDAO has both paid subscriptions and also contribution. More about that at https://lexdao.org/membership/ .

A more visceral 'NSFW' video by one of our core members here.

what are your main project funding sources?

Grants funding, user donations, other.

Membership stats at https://polygonscan.com/token/0xb9d79698599b3efa025c654b4c6f2c760c15d0d0 and https://polygonscan.com/token/0x9378f978C691F0247Dd75F5Efa4c77eFb31B26C6 (legacy)

how much have you raised for each of your funding sources and from who?

~79,500 OP from RetroPGF3, ~$70,000 from Gitcoin rounds, ~$710 from Giveth

are you seeking

Project-specific funding, funding for general operations

has your project launced or planning to launch a token?

No

share your project roadmap:

We are part-way done our roadmap here. More on the way. As we are a DAO, our roadmap slowly emerges.

what milestones have you achieved?

Cryptolawer directory, newsletter, weekly study group, ETHDenver events, multiple services and products offshoots such as:

  • https://twitter.com/cougardao (RWA DAO)

  • https://twitter.com/taterdao (RWA DAO)

  • https://doc.lex.clinic (running Creative Commons working group on NFTs)

  • https://lexblock.xyz (professional legal engineering project management)

  • https://twitter.com/kali__gg (legally integrated DAO summoner from Moloch framework authors)

  • https://twitter.com/ixiantech (legal engineering law firm in a polycentric jurisdiction)

  • https://www.daocoalition.org (helped Hats Protocol integrate Snapshot.org and Gitcoin Passport at https://github.com/daocoa )

  • https://x.com/web3coalition (got DDEX.net to create an NFT working group with a web3 leader as co-chair, Open Source Orchestra collab bull-revival plans for this or next year's Music Biz conference)

  • https://folk.gg (experiments in web3 permissionless-copyright)

tell us more about milestones you'd like to achieve

During the bear market, we were focused on keeping the lights on. Now that we have funds again we plan to have a dedicated General Counsel who can produce public good templates for the web3 community, spin up the Journal of Legal Engineering with https://descier.science , attend and host events at multiple conferences as we did with ETHDenver 2024, turn grants-out back on including retroactive funding for groups like https://coala.global , improve our legal directory, turn weekly legal hacks back on (we already turned weekly study group back on), switch to https://www.hatsprotocol.xyz governance, complete the web3-GAAP tools proto-described at https://ape.mirror.xyz as iNFTs and legal seals and likely other initiatives by our members as we can now focus our attention on the non-essential roadmap goals.

funding goal and budget

The most important thing at this point is that you vonate to show you believe "law is a public good."

We did this when we had no funds, so they aren't necessary.

However, with a treasury above this year's so-far $300,000, we could have a much bigger impact on law is a public good. Compare our budget to the budget for other legal projects.

tell us more about your team

Some of the top legal engineers and cyptolawyers are members of LexDAO. Here is a list of some of our members: https://twitter.com/search?q=lexdao&src=typed_query&f=user https://twitter.com/search?q=lex_dao&src=typed_query&f=user

Our event at the Gitcoin House this ETHDenver had x3 the capacity sign up to attend: https://twitter.com/lex_DAO/status/1762904086633177247

social credibility (development progress, awards, notable GitHub commits, referrals)

https://optimistic.etherscan.io/address/0x581b5e51ffbb742f92e818fb177cad8a30e43f3e , https://github.com/lexdao/ricardian , https://github.com/lexdao/lexlockerv2 , https://github.com/lexdao/kali , https://github.com/kalidao/wrappr , https://github.com/kalidao/keep , https://lexdao.substack.com/s/lexnews-weekly , https://lexdao.substack.com/ , https://ie.nani.ooo/ , https://github.com/lexDAO/hackmd

why's your project important?

Law affects so many parts of our lives. Lowering the cost of law has an exponential impact on human collaboration. Legal automation offers amazing opportunities to lower costs, but not all law can be automated. As such, LexDAO works in deterministic law (very automatable) and discretionary law (high-level reasons). Most importantly, we do this work as open source for the public good. Too few organizations offer pro-bono web3 legal services, and there ais more demand than LexDAO can currently offer.

what's your project's Twitter handle?

@lex_dao

GitHub link

https://github.com/lexdao

project Discord link

https://discord.gg/dAySQQPPsD

Discord contact:

@bestape

Telegram contact:

@bestape

wallet address:

0x966a4b9d5D2E01799170a0865C2D1cBBc1904163

anything else you'd like us to know?

We'd love to chat with you if you'd like to learn more about LexDAO. We're a DAO with a complex legacy, so it might make sense to interview our core and OG members. Feel free to reach out to me on Telegram if you're interested.

We have a grants call every Friday in our server at 8AM PST open to the public.

what can the Gitcoin Community help you with?

Help us revive our legal hacks call by coding with us! Would you like legal help? Please reach out to us!

how do you define impact for your project? what metrics are you tracking?

We are spending this year's funds on upgrading our metrics. Too much of our impact goes unquantified. Important metrics we are capturing include: number of active members, growth of our newsletter, attendees at our IRL vents, how many offshoots have spun out of our DAO, how many people looking for legal services awe connect with cryptolawyers.

share your project impact metrics and results

We would love to work with you and other professionals to help us better capture metrics, plan a portion of our OP RetroPGF3 to create an anual impact report. We've already reached out to https://twitter.com/carl_cervone and General Magic for assistance and are in the early stages of the process. The Commons Economy Roadmap has already generated a report for us, and we're in talks with them about adding additional elements to their report. We'll likely explore hypercerts with more focus.

Some thoughts about better metrics reporting: how many offshoots (e.g. Kali, TaterDAO, Clinic)? what impact do those offshoots have? how many members? how many people we help find lawyers? how many questions we answer in our Discord? how many study groups we have and how many people attend? how many IRL life events we have and how many attendees? how many people subscribe to our newsletter? for our offshoots that publish smart contracts how often those contracts are used and in what way? when we start grants-out again how do we capture metrics there?

LexDAO History

People donating to LexDAO, also donated to

Developing web3 tech for nonprofits, with multilingual, zero-fee, crypto donation platforms, referral rewards, NFT collections, and plans for Quadratic Funding and DAO integration.
Accelerating access to solar energy for underserved communities via blockchain, The Solar Foundation focuses on off-grid projects in Africa and pilot UBI programs for rural empowerment and climate resilience.
Developing an Ecological Benefits Framework (EBF) to align carbon markets with broader ecological benefits such as air, water, soil, biodiversity, and equity through stakeholder collaboration and three key tools: Activator, Common Language, and Storytelling.
A game where your digital jinni evolves through your real-world actions, integrating social experiences and tracking progress via an app synchronized with various digital platforms. Now seeking alpha testers.
Web3 climate project supports indigenous communities in the Global South through education, fundraising, and the development of regenerative practices to enhance biodiversity, sovereignty, and climate resilience.