"We believe disintermediation is one of the most effective ways to protect individual freedom." "Even an honest intermediary is a single point of failure and a single point of pressure." job's not done till DTCC, Broadridge, and brokers are out of business

I was today years old when I learned there is a 'sync committee' on Ethereum specifically to make attestations for light clients, it has no slashing for bad behavior, and is paid $80M ETH a year. Apparently it can be replaced with proving & this issuance can be reduced.

I just voted confidentially on @theInterfold 's first DAO proposal, which was for adoption of a DAO constitution although confidential, those who've followed me will be able to infer how I voted lol that being said, it's awesome to see this confidential voting tech in action, and one area where I think it will really shine is stockholder governance you ask where can tokenization really make a difference? well, encryption is a much better privacy solution than brokers and Broadridge!

@RAILGUN_Project and @0xprivacypools get flak for sanctions checks, but neither can freeze or take your funds without notice. RAILGUN: screening is client side, and a flagged shield can still unshield back to its origin. Confiscating funds would take a smart contract upgrade, which requires a RAIL vote--a form of public due process--with the exact calldata onchain 7+ days before execution. and no confiscation policy is currently contemplated. Privacy Pools: the ASP can withhold approval, which forces a public ragequit to your deposit address. Deanonymization, not seizure. to me this is the line of "permissionless but not lawless "...anyone can use these systems with no fear of funds seizure, but there are legal protections that may nerf certain features...

🚨🚨🚨 the SEC released updated guidance on token buybacks 🚨🚨🚨 it seems there is a decentralization premise here after all here is the redline

@HesterPeirce I gotta agree with @milesjennings here. Taking everything you guys have put out--the spring guidance, Reg Crypto, and now this--it looks to me and every other lawyer I've talked to like a massive loophole is being opened where a high-reputation team can just make no promises/representations and be outside the securities laws. People will still buy the token, because it's a high-reputation team and the people will have FOMO. What this is saying is that "each issuer determines the thresholds"--the issuer is determining itself whether and to what extent securities laws will apply. This is the SEC cabining Howey so that the only facts and circumstances relevant to determining whether an investment contract exists are the issuer's own words. Consider cases like LBRY where the court looked to facts about incentive alignment etc. and explicitly rejecting the argument that promises are needed. Maybe cabining Howey this way is the right answer--after all, it's a super fuzzy-logic test that has imposed massive costs on projects and been excessively padded the pockets of lawyers. But it *will* cause a loophole, or that's certainly how it's being perceived, so if that's *not* the Staff's intention or that's not what you really mean, something major is getting lost in translation.

read the SEC's new crypto assets FAQ the securities laws are starting to look opt-in now, at least as applied by the SEC to crypto if you raise money by selling a non-rights-bearing token, are careful about what you represent or promise, and have a functional crypto system, there is now an extremely broad path outside the securities laws--arguably 'functionality' is not even necessary but there's some equivocation on this the buyback guidance goes further than I expected. once the system is functional, even announcing a token buyback *program* (which I guess even could be a 'perpetual program') does not, in the staff's view, constitute a promise of essential managerial efforts. same for promises to improve the system or grow its network effects so you can retain enormous influence over the thing, keep developing it, support its price with buybacks (including under a permanent "program"), and get many of the benefits of having a public investment instrument, without giving holders the rights or protections that normally come with one they have opened a loophole in a regulatory regime whose whole point was supposed to be that you couldn't draft your way around economic reality (see e.g. can't really say if this is good or bad, but VCs etc. got a lot of what they wanted & the market should absorb all the implications of this among others, I am growing skeptical how much of a 'long tail' there will be for tokenized equity. . .if you can get people to buy a coin in the style of BNB, HYPE, PUMP, etc., with minimal regulation, why voluntarily take on the burdens of selling them equity? if you are not mag-7 level, it doesn't seem there would be much reason to focus on equity securities for your capital-raising. . . if you want to access 'traditional buyers' you can wrap the token in an equity instrument like an ADR for those institutions. . . the obvious next question is how far this extends beyond crypto businesses. can an ordinary company attach a functional token to its business and apply 100% of its profits to discretionary buybacks, without giving holders any right to those profits or making representations about future business efforts that independently trigger Howey? the FAQ doesn't expressly resolve that, but it opens a pretty enormous door equity still gives investors something a discretionary buyback token doesn't. . .the question is whether the market will pay enough for those rights to make granting them worthwhile. otherwise the incentive is to keep the equity for insiders and sell everyone else the coin crypto's current focus on hyping tokenized equity may be misguided, the bigger trend is "get all the benefits of equity with none of the burdens" of course this is SEC guidance, not a repeal of the statutes or a command to the courts. a private plaintiff or a future SEC could have other ideas but did not think I'd see it in my lifetime. . .the securities laws are being "disrupted" in substantial part by incentivizing making fewer commitments to investors. and if Warren Dems eventually take control and try to undo all this, after an entire market has organized around it, the resulting chaos will be something to behold

all I can say is it felt good back in Gensler days responding to the SEC's hostile investigations roughly like 'fuck off, this is all just code' I attached hundreds of pages of solidity code and just answered questions like 'see code set forth in Exhibit A' the space has gone soft

was reflecting on past / present of @Rhynotic’s journey just adds to the proof that the fastest way to learn and succeed is to keep shipping. the learning compounds and he’s now had two major hits almost back to back the faster you can cut a miss and keep moving the quicker you’ll land a hit and the other side now is how these experiments can plug into each other. he’s now single handedly cooking up an ecosystem and what didn’t work yesterday can always be resurrected tomorrow

I’m a bit behind on MetaLeX in general, but I want to see more governance primitives / companies move onchain. we already know what happens when equity / tokens and actual control are misaligned. I also think @lex_node might be the most cypherpunk legal person in the industry. he left a trad legal career to actually build in crypto around a pretty clear set of values and a long-term vision. that takes either a lot of conviction or a very specific kind of insanity lol.

We recently released Privacy adversaries, which shows which adversaries each privacy protocol protects you from. Every protocol page has a detailed section, where each rating comes with advice on what a careful user can do to stay private. Here's are some of the top advices 👇

at MetaLeX we're pionieering the category of "cybernetic law"... I don't think people yet grasp the potential unlocked by making your spending key also be your legal signing authority, but they will docusign should really be a money app. . .