This funding proposal will be brief. When Moloch DAO launched it was a refreshing take on using the Ethereum technology to feed itself with ETH. The need for scalability was more than obvious if this whole experiment with decentralization was going to work. Soon after, the Moloch OGs launched the venture side of the technology with V2, which was a necessary take on the legal dimension of crowdfunding (recovering from PTSDAO…), supporting rapid deployment of capital with protection both in the form of code and legal wrappers (MetaCartel Ventures and The LAO both were pegged to Delaware LLCs and pioneered code deferential agreements that brought code closer to law than ever before with real skin in the game).
The focus has always been on pushing Ethereum forward and solving coordination problems around frequent points of contention and extraction – where open source contributors get otherwise left behind. I have been a bit disappointed, I will admit, to see the community around these endeavors is focused more lately on product development that doesn’t align with these macro visions but rewards repeat players who have close social ties. Moloch isn’t just a bridge lender for developers that are competing with each other. It goes deeper - protocol or pro bono services, imo. This is what it is. Moloch seems to be pivoting anyways towards the Protocol Guild which seems like a welcome evolution now that the meme and the enemy is known and good people are building great technology around DAOs.
My ask here again is simple. The legal layer of Ethereum needs to be fast, frequent and free (or at least priced against the creep of its own disruption). It needs to be delivered by people who are trusted operators in the space and who don’t seek to control developers or turn them into cash cows.
I was encouraged to see LexDAO, a legal slash developer community that has been around since the beginning of Moloch, receive a gitcoin grant to provide legal aid at low cost to developers and new Ethereum ventures.
This proposal seeks to supplement this grant in light of the need for not only legal advice, but legal advocacy to secure theories of constitutional rights around the use of zk tech and digital asset mixers. See for example, this article which was written well before its time on the first amendment implications for Ethereum users.
The deliverables will be thus at the request of $42k in ETH:
- Series of Articles on Constitutional Rights to Crypto Privacy
- Amicus Curiae in related litigation, such as requests for injunctions on overbroad enforcement actions against developers or smart contract deployments
- Legal Aid to advise developers on how to structure their DAO and/or products which respect both “the Law’” but also the rights of their users
That’s it, really. Moloch is dead. Long live Moloch. Ride on ethereans 
