New Legal Resources for the 0x Ecosystem
By: Jason Somensatto
Tags: 0xproject, Legal, Cryptocurrency, Ethereum, Crypto

My Role at 0x

I have a unique (and awesome) job for a lawyer. My title is Strategic Legal Counsel for the 0x Core Team and my primary responsibilities are to help the broader 0x developer ecosystem address the interesting legal issues presented by working with an open financial protocol like 0x, and to serve as an ambassador to the legal and policy communities wrestling with how to respond to technologies like 0x and the projects being built on top of it.



Since October, I have been meeting with independent developers building on 0x, as well as other Decentralized Finance teams, in an attempt to learn about the legal issues they are facing and brainstorm about how to best connect them with helpful legal resources. As someone who has been working in this industry in some capacity for over four years, it has been very cool to see the projects that teams are working on, which have brought the technology so far. As a result, it is easy to be genuinely motivated to find ways to help these teams succeed. In that spirit, I am excited to share more about a couple of projects we are rolling out for the 0x ecosystem.

0x Legal Wiki & Library

The first project is an open source legal reference resource designed specifically for developer teams building projects that may integrate 0x or other open decentralized financial protocols. This resource consists of two parts: (1) The 0x Legal Wiki summarizes some of the key U.S. laws that may impact projects built on 0x; (2) The 0x Legal Library is a collection of links to important cases, statements from regulators, and commentary by others within the legal community addressing the application of these laws to the crypto industry.



Unlike most similar legal resources, these documents will be hosted on GitHub. The idea is that, just like open-source software, these should be living documents that can be updated and benefit from the contributions of the community. Right now, the documents are fairly limited, focusing only on certain U.S. regulatory regimes. To the extent that this proves to be helpful for developers, the chance to make these resources more robust would be great. For example, if you are developer and interested in understanding IP issues around NFTs in more detail, go to GitHub and create a pull request or comment on that topic, and I will try to dig in and start creating some helpful content to merge into the final docs.



As a single lawyer, it is impossible for me to develop a deep knowledge of every relevant law in every conceivable jurisdiction that may impact developers integrating 0x. Another hope I have for this project, therefore, will be to get other lawyers who may be interested in the technology to contribute on issues they are knowledgeable about. So if you are, for example, a lawyer in Europe or Singapore or if you are U.S. lawyer experienced with tax, IP, or any number of topics, and you want to find a way to get involved in this industry, I would love to collaborate with you. And who knows, this may help connect you to some incredible teams building on 0x that may be looking for a good lawyer of their own.



Lawyers should be in the business of helping clients apply the law, not serving as gatekeepers that must be hired even to understand what the law is. So, come help me open source the law and create the first comprehensive source of legal knowledge about decentralized exchange.

AMA

As for the second initiative, we know a lot of developers have questions about the legal and regulatory environment. Although I cannot be your lawyer or provide direct legal advice on any particular project, the 0x Core Team is committed to encouraging the development of a healthy ecosystem of projects integrating 0x. And I recognize that the 0x Legal Wiki & Library cannot account for all the questions you may have considering the wide variety of implementations that can be built with an open-source protocol like 0x.



To that end, we are going to conduct an AMA for you to ask any questions you may have for me (or about me). We will curate the most popular questions and publish my responses in a future blog post.



Submit your AMA questions for me here: https://link.0x.org/Jason-AMA



Even if you don’t have a question, feel free to reach out on Twitter, Discord, or elsewhere just to chat. I look forward to hearing from all of you!