Cryptography advocates once argued that “code is law.” Courts and legal experts eventually drove the phrase out of circulation, but there's still plenty of money being spent on figuring out how the two intertwine.
One such effort is crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro's MetaLeX, a hybrid law firm and technology company focused on the disruption that crypto projects cause as they try to “decentralize.” MetaLeX recently raised $2.75 million in seed funding led by Cyberfund. Shapiro said the company is now valued at $27.5 million.
Unlike “centralized” projects in the traditional business world, many crypto projects aim to be “decentralized” by giving token holders control over budgets and other core operations. This is a costly, cumbersome and error-prone path that major DeFi players are trying to overcome. Sushi Swap And it often leaves room for organizations to make arbitrary decisions that violate their own spirit.
Enter that fray with Shapiro’s very niche MetaLeX, which he described in an interview with CoinDesk as a “B2B crypto software-as-a-service” company that designs standardized, smart-contract-based processes for so-called decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) to operate properly on-chain.
In MetaLeX terminology, this new structure is called a Cybernetic Organization, or BORG. Think of it as a cyborg version of a corporation. According to the project, these organizations will be governed by rules that are embodied in their charters and enforced in hard-coded smart contracts. White Paper.
“What's unique about them is the way they mandate smart contract functionality in their operations,” Shapiro said. “That makes them 'cybernetic.'”
MetaLeX’s first product will be an operating system for DAOs to BORG their governance decision-making process, with a structure to handle grant-making, emergency shutdowns and venture investments on behalf of the organization, he said.
Shapiro said that crypto projects are trying to join the MetaLeX OS waiting list “every day,” including two “blue chip” projects, though he declined to name them other than to say they are a layer-2 blockchain and a “traditional DeFi DAO.”
“Both companies want to fully BORG their operations,” he said.
Not all crypto projects can be easily BORGified: Projects that already have tokens and DAO governance processes up and running will be more difficult to navigate than pre-tokenization projects, Shapiro said.
MetaLeX itself is not a BORG, a DAO, or anything crypto-specific. It's an umbrella brand for a Delaware corporation (a technology company) and a Texas limited liability partnership (the law firm headed by Shapiro and Alex Golubitsky). Shapiro said clients can use either one or both.
Shapiro said MetaLeX may one day have its own token if it evolves into a legitimate protocol that requires customer control.
“It's probably going to take us a while to get to that stage, but I think we'll get there eventually,” he said.
