Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs) - Law Commission Call for Evidence

Overview

This is a call for evidence by the Law Commission for England and Wales.

The Law Commission has been asked to undertake a 15-month scoping study to explore and describe the current treatment of DAOs under the law of England and Wales and identify options for how they should be treated in law in the future in a way which would clarify their status and facilitate uptake.  Given the myriad DAO implementations, the scoping study might identify different “types” or “classes” of DAOs to which different rules might need to apply. In particular, some DAO organisational structures might be more or less “decentralised” or “autonomous” than others, which might justify different legal treatment.

For more information about this project, click here.

We recommend that respondees read the call for evidence before responding. Respondees do not need to answer all the questions if they are only interested in some aspects of the call for evidence.

About the Law Commission: The Law Commission is a statutory body, created by the Law Commissions Act 1965 (“the 1965 Act”) for the purpose of promoting the reform of the law. It is an advisory Non Departmental Public Body sponsored by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ). The Law Commission is independent of Government. For more information about the Law Commission please click here.

Responses to this call for evidence: We aim to be transparent in our decision-making, and to explain the basis on which we have reached conclusions. We may publish or disclose information you provide in response to this call for evidence, including personal information. For example, we may publish an extract of your response in Law Commission publications, or publish the response itself. We may also share responses with Government. Additionally, we may be required to disclose the information, such as in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act 2000. We will process your personal data in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation. For information about how we handle your personal data, please see our privacy notice.

Please state clearly whether your submission is to be treated as confidential if you are naming the particular DAO involved in your consideration of legal issues. We appreciate the potentially significant legal risks surrounding DAOs and encourage sanitised or anonymised submissions where it is inappropriate to provide details about a particular DAO

Responses are most effective where we are able to report who responded, and what they said. If you consider that it is necessary for all or some of the information that you provide to be treated as confidential and so neither published nor disclosed, please contact us before sending it. Please limit the confidential material to the minimum, clearly identify it and explain why you want it to be confidential. We cannot guarantee that confidentiality can be maintained in all circumstances and an automatic disclaimer generated by your IT system will not be regarded as binding on the Law Commission.

Alternatively, you may want your response to be anonymous. That means that we may refer to what you say in your response, but will not reveal that the information came from you. You might want your response to be anonymous because it contains sensitive information about you or your family, or because you are worried about other people knowing what you have said to us.

We list who responded to our consultations in our reports. If you provide a confidential response your name will appear in that list. If your response is anonymous we will not include your name in the list unless you have given us permission to do so.