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by whatisweb3 1404 days ago
By this logic every blockchain developer should be arrested. The TC developers are not collecting fees directly, but they probably did give themselves a large supply of tokens to maintain control over the protocol, since the tokens were designed for governance.

You can name any blockchain and see the same pattern. You can name many applications on top of blockchains, like Uniswap, and see similar. All of these protocols are known to facilitate some amount of illegal activity. Does this mean all developers of these protocols should be charged?
1 comments
paulsutter 1404 days ago
No this means that you should talk with a serious law firm before you start one of these projects. OFAC, KYC, securities, AML/CFT, so many laws apply and without expert advice you can end up in a bad spot

Expert lawyers do exist, example:

https://www.perkinscoie.com/en/professionals/j-dax-hansen.ht...

"Dax has advised and continues to work with many of the leading companies, industry associations and consortia. Projects include U.S. and international digital currency exchanges, vaulting and custody solutions, bitcoin kiosks, tokenized gold and commodities, decentralized exchanges, autonomous smart contracts, stable coins, and Non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Beginning in late 2016, Dax worked with his colleagues to apply a new level of legal counseling to established software projects undertaking token sales related to decentralized applications (DApps) and distributed protocols..."

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whatisweb3 1404 days ago
There is still no legal precedent around a case like this as it relates to DAOs and autonomous smart contracts, so a law firm could not have told you anything except "we can neither confirm nor deny." If there is another US sanction that targets a non-custodial smart contract and open source project, please do share.

Devastating that it has come to "do not code an E2EE privacy tool because you might find yourself in jail one day."

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JumpCrisscross 1404 days ago
> no legal precedent around a case like this as it relates to DAOs and autonomous smart contracts, so a law firm could not have told you anything except "we can neither confirm nor deny."

Have you hired counsel? This isn’t what lawyers do.

Good counsel should provide guard rails. They will say this is novel and that they can’t guarantee anything, but lawyers do that anyway. They’re giving advice, not judgement.

One of those rails would involve responding to credible public allegations around being used to launder money by Pyongyang.

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