Currently under review by The DAO, the distributed autonomous organization that has raised over $150m worth of the cryptocurrency ether to date, is a proposal by one of the most recognizable people in bitcoin that would fund a project aimed at encoding a decades-old international legal structure into smart contracts.
Submitted by "Mastering Bitcoin" author Andreas Antonopoulos on 23rd May, the proposal entails a decentralized arbitration and mediation network, or DAMN, that would be built on top of the New York Convention legal structure.
Passed by the UN in 1958, the New York Convention is an agreement between more than 65 countries establishing that any decision made by a recognized arbitrator will not only be recognized by the courts of those nations, but enforced by them.
The resulting legal structure lets businesses and individuals alike resolve their problems in a legally enforceable way that, instead of being recognized in just one jurisdiction, is enforced across borders in some of the largest countries in the world, including the US.
If successful, DAMN would give its users access to a new form of dispute resolution that is not only more affordable, but almost borderless, according to Antonopoulos.
Antonopoulos told CoinDesk: "We’re going to create software that anyone can use and build on. We’re not going to be running DAMN. There’s not going to be one system than runs this. The important thing is the ‘D’, decentralized." According to the proposal submitted to The DAO for funding, DAMN will be a sort of "opt-in justice system for commercial transactions".
Through a network of smart contracts built on the public Ethereum blockchain, the benefits offered by the New York Convention and other alternative dispute resolution services will be made available more widely.
Still in its development phase, Antonopoulos and his co-creator, Pamela Morgan, CEO of Third Key Solutions, intend for […]
