The Source for Blockchain Legal News & Opinion
Blockchain Legal Digest is taking a break while the author explores other opportunities, including possibly a blog and podcast that more broadly address the intersection of law and technology.
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I put together this report addressing how blockchain technology could address some of the challenges we’re facing in the pandemic.
2019 was another year in which crazy-get-rich cryptocurrency schemes led not to #WhenLambo but instead to #WhenHandcuffs. Stories about disappearing crypto and government crackdowns were among the top news stories about blockchain regulation. But, 2019 was also a year in which the foundations for legal order may have been laid.
Here are 2019’s top 10 stories about developments in blockchain regulation:
10. American Footballer Falls Afoul of Feds: Former professional football player and co-owner of the Minnesota Vikings (hopefully, not Lizzo’s new man) is charged with violating federal law in connection with the alleged operation of a “shadow banking” service for cryptocurrency startups. According to news reports, Fowler is planning to plead guilty at a hearing in January.
9. HMU on KIK: You may know it as the way to DM your BAE on the down-low, but the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) claims KIK went too low in issuing $100 million worth of unregistered crypto tokens. KIK claimed the SEC was “playing dirty” and “trying to make [KIK] look bad.” Insert smiley face emoji here.
8. Disappearing Act: A team of lawyers and accountants began unraveling the mystery surrounding the untimely death of Gerald Cotten in 2018 and the disappearance of more than $100 million in cryptocurrency held by Cotten’s Canadian crypto-exchange, Quadriga. A prediction for 2020: the only people who will see any real money from the unwinding of Quadriga will be the lawyers and accountants and you can bet they won’t be paid in crypto.
7. Wyoming Stakes Claim: It may be a state where the buffalo roam and the deer and the antelope play, but Wyoming passed a series of laws aimed at making it a utopia for blockchain-based businesses. Seldom was heard a discouraging word, except about that hell pit of blockchain regulation, New York state.
6. Rise of Enterprise Blockchain: Although it’s not purely legal news, the emergence of enterprise blockchain solutions, including from Blue Chip firms such as IBM, Amazon and Oracle, carries the potential to change the narrative about blockchain regulation from stories about cryptocurrency shenanigans to stories about fraud reduction and trust-building.
5. British Barristers Bless Blockchain: The U.K. Jurisdiction Taskforce of the Lawtech Delivery Panel issued a report that concluded that cryptocurrency should be considered legal property, which means that it can receive the same treatment under the law as other assets in circumstances such as bankruptcy or theft. The panel also recognized that smart contracts can be treated as legally enforceable in the same manner as other more traditional contracts.
4. China Continues to Cool Crypto Flame: China’s central banking authority announced a further crackdown on cryptocurrency. The People’s Bank of China said in a statement that “the issuance, financing and trading of virtual currencies involve multiple risks.” The crackdown comes shortly after officials in Shenzhen announced a similar crackdown and as the RBOC prepares to offer its own cryptocurrency.
3. SEC Acts on Token Offering; Noone Goes to Jail: The SEC qualifies a token offering from Blockstack, which operates a decentralized computing platform. The approval of Blockstack’s $40 million token offering was the first time that the SEC qualified an offering of blockchain digital assets, and demonstrated a path to compliance.
2. SEC Releases Long-Awaited Guidelines: The SEC announced a framework for analysis of digital assets and at the same time issued a no-action letter for tokens offered by a charter jet service. An article in Harvard Law Review described the framework and no-action letter as indicating “that the SEC is open to excluding some blockchain-based digital assets from securities regulations. This development is meaningful because it marks a shift away from the former uncertainty, which was likely a function of the SEC’s desire to promote innovation.”
1. Bitcoin Bounces Back: It’s not a pure regulatory story, but to many people Bitcoin = blockchain. As long as Bitcoin gives the appearance of being a means for get-rich schemes and as long as it has value to scammers, it will drive a narrative that associates blockchain with illegal behavior. After being on the ropes at the end of 2018 when it was valued at about $3,700, the price of Bitcoin grew about 97% in 2019, ending at a price over $7,000. Bitcoin remains a fascinating experiment in an asset that is, at its best, a currency alternative and an investment opportunity but, at its worst, a tool for fraudsters.
An American technologist is facing U.S. charges for allegedly violating economic sanctions against North Korea.
Virgil Griffith, who lives in Singapore, is accused of traveling to North Korea to deliver a presentation and provide technical advice on using cryptocurrency and blockchain technology to evade sanctions. He was arrested at Los Angeles International Airport on Nov. 27.
“Despite receiving warnings not to go, Griffith allegedly traveled to one of the United States’ foremost adversaries, North Korea, where he taught his audience how to use blockchain technology to evade sanctions,” said Assistant Attorney General John Demers.
Some, though, are coming to Griffith’s support, including starting a petition to free him.
Griffith is represented by an L.A. lawyer, Brian Klein.
Editor’s Note: This is an installment of a series of articles providing background to smart contracts coders about how contracts work in real life. The articles reference this sample sales contract. This guide is intended for general informational purposes only. If you need legal advice about a specific situation, contact a lawyer.
The third part of a contract is what I call The Money section. It says how much is being paid, when it’s being paid and what conditions apply to payment. It’s Section 3 in the sample sales contract.
If you’re writing code for a smart contract, here’s where the magic should happen. It’s what’s going to lead to a few killer lines of code — the “if then” statement that is going to remove layers of back-office administration. This is what gets people jazzed about smart contracts.
But here’s where smart contracts become a little theoretical, particularly outside the realm of purely digital transactions. If you’re writing a contract for the delivery of 100 widgets — the kind of simple sales transaction that the sample contract is intended to cover — what is your trigger going to be for payment?
Will your trigger be a digital notice of delivery of the widgets from the shipper? That works if you’re writing a contract that is very favorable to the seller of the widgets because the seller would get paid even if the box only contains 80 widgets or the buyer ordered green widgets and the box contained 100 pink widgets. Fedex’s notice of completion of delivery isn’t going to address either of those situations, and if you’re the buyer that sucks because you’re bearing all of the risk of a problem that is in control of the seller.
The sample contract includes optional language that makes payment subject to acceptance of the shipment, which seems like a fair balance of the risks, but it adds in a layer of subjectivity that smart contracts aim to remove. One day, IoT sensors will be cheap and common enough that they can be attached to the widgets and help solve this problem, with the movement of the widgets logged on a blockchain. There’s a lot of work being done in this area, but it’s not mainstream yet, and it doesn’t solve for quality issues such as poorly made widgets or even the color of the widgets.
One solution is to provide a method for the buyer to reject a shipment — in part or in full — within a certain time after delivery and then make payment contingent on the buyer not objecting. It’s not a perfectly clean solution. The buyer could object to a shipment without justification and hold up payment, and even if the objection is justified, the buyer and seller are going to have to try to work through the issue.
Smart contracts have the promise of making transactions more efficient, but they are going to have to deal with real world issues, and real world issues are messy.
Next up: Part 4 — The Risk Shifting
Editor’s Note: This is an installment of a series of articles providing background to smart contracts coders about how contracts work in real life. The articles reference this sample sales contract. This guide is intended for general informational purposes only. If you need legal advice about a specific situation, contact a lawyer.
The second section of a contract is the scope of work. This is where the action is. It describes the promises and obligations of each of the parties. In the sample contract, it’s sections 1 and 2, which describe what’s being sold, when it needs to be delivered and where.
The sample is a contract for the sale of goods, which is a simple business relationship. I send you money, and you send me widgets. In a more complex relationship, the description would be a lot longer than it is in the sample. In some cases, particularly if one party is building something complex for the other party, the terms are put in a document that is attached to the back of the contract.
Contracts drafters may use the term schedule, exhibit, appendix, attachment or statement of work for this separate document. Don’t get caught up in what it’s called. The names are pretty much interchangeable. They’re used for a couple of reasons. They make the flow of the main part of the contract a little smoother because they move some of the more complex terms to the back of the contract, but the main reason to move terms to a schedule is that there may be a different group of people that are focused on those terms than the terms in the main agreement. For example, if the contract covers the development of software, there may be a separate schedule that will require the attention of software engineers, solution architects and project managers. If the scope of work is in a separate document, these folks can trade drafts while others — lawyers, sales people and the business development team — work on the main sections of the agreement.
The main key to the scope of work section is to ensure it’s accurate and complete. If you’re the one providing the goods or services, you’ll want to make sure it doesn’t promise more than you intend to deliver. If you’re the one buying the goods or services, you’ll want to make sure it doesn’t promise less than you think you’re paying for.
Next up: Part 3 — The Money
Editor’s Note: This is the second installment of a series of articles providing background to smart contracts coders about how contracts work in real life. The articles reference this sample sales contract. This guide is intended for general informational purposes only. If you need legal advice about a specific situation, contact a lawyer.
Nearly all contracts begin by identifying the people or businesses that are making promises that are memorialized in the contract. You’ll see in the sample that it has a blank for “STATUS OF BUSINESS.” Yipes! What I think that really means is the type of business (in the U.S., this generally is a corporation or a limited liability company) so that it would say Acme, Inc.” or “Acme, LLC”, but considering the sample is pretty old-school, it’s also likely expecting that you’ll include the state of registration so that it would say “Acme, Inc., a Delaware corporation” or “Acme, LLC, a New York limited liability company.” Trust me, you can skip that information if it’s not readily available. Lawyers waste a bunch of time trying to track down the state of incorporation including too often for subsidiary companies of their own employer. I supposed this information could be useful in a lawsuit, but I think it appears in contracts mostly because people are afraid of the unknown consequences of leaving it off. God forbid if you’re the first person to not include the state of incorporation in a contract. The Law doesn’t like change.
In addition to identifying the parties to a contract, the introductory paragraph usually also identifies the start date of the contract. Until you’ve done a contracts due diligence review, you have no idea how often people screw up the date of the contract, and people looking years later can’t figure out when then contract was supposed to start or, generally more importantly, end. Was a contract that was sent by email on December 28, 2018, really meant to start on January 1, 2018 or was that a typo? Or then there are the contracts with a missing date. Again, you may need to look back at emails (if you have them) to see when it appears the parties intended the contract to start. The lesson here for coders is make sure you’re capturing the intended start for the contract you’re working on, and remember that is usually, but not always, the day the parties are signing the contract.
The next part of the introductory section of the contract is the recitals paragraph. I hate the term recitals. It sounds as bad to my ears as an afternoon of listening to little kids playing Chopsticks on the piano. Some people call them the “whereases,” but that is even more awful. As-es? You can’t be serious. If you know what you’re doing, you call this the background section, you write it in plain English (or whatever the native language is for your contract) and you actually make this useful. With high-volume sales contracts, there shouldn’t be much doubt about the background, but with customized, one-off contracts it’s really helpful to have a good description of why the parties were entering into the contract and what they intended to accomplish.
Next up: Part 2 — The Scope of Work
So, if you’re doing smart contracts as, well, actual contracts, it might be a good idea to know something about contracts.
Law students in the United States spend one semester taking one class on contracts, and at least at the better law schools, it’s all theoretical and you don’t actually learn anything about contracts. I’m serious. In three years at one of the best law schools in the U.S., the only contract I saw was the lease agreement for my apartment.
It takes time grinding out billable hours at a Big Law firm to really learn contracts the way a good software engineer understands the flow of well-written code. It’s one of those Malcolm Gladwell 10,000-hour things. Except, unlike some kid learning the violin who becomes a virtuoso between ages 4 and 18, as a law firm associate you get your 10,000 hours under your belt in two years because you’re trading time for money — actually your firm is trading your time for their money — in the most brazen way.
Anyway, here’s my effort to distill my 10,000 hours into a 20-minute read, and like a cheap wine distilled into grappa, it’s going to go down a little rough.
You’ll need something to follow along with, so here’s a sample sales contract that I found on the web. Like everything else you’re going to find on the web, it’s awful, but it was free and didn’t require trading my PII. And it’s good enough to demonstrate the points I’m going to make.
I’m going to break contracts into five parts. You’ve heard about contracts that were written on paper napkins like the world’s best footballer (soccer player for those of you in the States) Lionel Messi signing with Barcelona as a teenager, but those kind of contracts only work when there aren’t any disputes. Real contracts run several pages, and you can bet Messi’s current contract isn’t written on a cocktail napkin.
Here’s how I’ll break contracts down:
Part 1: The introduction
Part 2: The scope of work
Part 3: The money
Part 4: The risk shifting
Part 5: The miscellaneous junk that lawyers feel obligated to include.
Stay tuned for future installments.
Last year, I took a blockchain business strategy class offered by MIT. The class was good and one of the key points was made by Christian Catalini, one of the professors who’s now apparently on leave from MIT because he’s a co-founder of the Libra cryptocurrency and the chief Economist for Calibra.
I can’t find the exact quote, but it was something like: “It’s going to be really important for lawyers to work with software engineers to realize the promise of blockchain technology.”
Nowhere is this more true than with smart contracts. Yes, I know there’s been discussion that smart contracts aren’t necessarily legal contracts, but if they’re done right, smart contracts have the potential to make contracting more efficient and eliminate a lot of work that takes place in the backend to properly operationalize contracts.
Real contracts are like code. It takes experience to do them well, and like Catalini said, it’s going to require lawyers working with software engineers to really make smart contracts work well.
Good lawyers and good software engineers bear a lot of similarities. They’re fascinated with code, and good contracts are like good software code. The best contracts are not only functional; they are elegant in their simplicity.
Software engineers and lawyers also are similar in that they tend to be stubborn. I remember my first meeting with the CTO I worked with years ago. He told me right off the bat that he was “pretty good at interpreting contracts” with the implication being that didn’t really need my help. I told him I’d make him a deal “if you promise to not interpret contracts, I promise to not write code.” We had a really good working relationship after that because we had mutual respect for each other’s strengths.
But smart contracts are only of those areas where we can’t just mark off our territory. It’s going to take collaboration between lawyers and coders. To that end, I’m offering a guide to contracts gives coders working with smart contracts the opportunity to learn something about the structure of contracts in real life. You’ll see this guide published in several installments on this blog in the coming days and weeks.
Counselor Convicted of Crypto Crimes: A former law firm partner who aimed to earn $50 million by age 50 has found himself facing up to 50 years in prison for his role in a crypto-related money laundering scheme. Mark S. Scott, a former partner at international firm Locke Lord, was convicted in U.S. federal court in New York of laundering $400 million in proceeds of a massive international fraud scheme known as “OneCoin” through fraudulent investment funds that Scott set up and operated for that purpose, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office. Scott received more than $50 million for his money laundering services, which he used to buy luxury cars, a yacht, and several seaside homes.
“Scott … used his specialized knowledge as an experienced corporate lawyer to set up fake investment funds, which he used to launder hundreds of millions of dollars of fraud proceeds. He lined his pockets with over $50 million of the money stolen from victims of the OneCoin scheme. Scott, who boasted of earning ‘50 by 50’ now faces 50 years in prison for his crimes.”
Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman
Recognizing Crypto and Smart Contracts: A U.K. panel issued a report this week on the legal status of cryptocurrency and smart contracts. The U.K. Jurisdiction Taskforce of the Lawtech Delivery Panel concluded that cryptocurrency should be considered legal property, which means that it can receive the same treatment under the law as other assets in circumstances such as bankruptcy or theft. The panel also recognized that smart contracts can be treated as legally enforceable in the same manner as other more traditional contracts.
China Cracks Down on Crypto: China’s central banking authority has announced a further crackdown on cryptocurrency, according to a report from Reuters. The People’s Bank of China said in a statement that “the issuance, financing and trading of virtual currencies involve multiple risks.” The crackdown comes shortly after officials in Shenzhen announced a similar crackdown and as the RBOC prepares to offer its own cryptocurrency.