Blockchain
Cryptocurrency Governance Consultant MetaLeX Raises $2.75 Million
Cryptography advocates used to postulate that “code is law.” Courts and legal experts eventually forced the sentence to drop. But there’s still a lot of money in understanding how the two intertwine.
One such effort is crypto lawyer Gabriel Shapiro’s MetaLeX, a hybrid law firm and tech company focused on the chaos that crypto projects create when they try to “decentralize.” MetaLeX recently raised $2.75 million in seed funding led by Cyber Fund. It is now valued at $27.5 million, Shapiro said.
Unlike their “centralized” counterparts in the traditional business world, many crypto projects seek to “decentralize” by giving token holders control of budgets and other core operations. It’s an expensive, cumbersome, and failure-prone journey that has bedeviled major DeFi players SushiSwap and often leaves the organization open to making arbitrary decisions that break its own ethics.
Into this fray enters Shapiro’s incredibly niche MetaLeX. In an interview with CoinDesk, he described it as a “business-to-business crypto software as a service” company that is designing standardized, smart contract-based processes for so-called decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, to run successfully . -chain.
In MetaLeX parlance, the name of this new construct is the Cybernetic Organization, or BORG. Think of it as a cyborg equivalent for legal entities. According to the project, they will be governed by rules codified and enforced by smart contracts inserted into their statutes White paper.
“What makes them unique is how they impose smart contract functionality” into their operations,” Shapiro said. “This makes them ‘cybernetic.'”
MetaLeX’s first product will be an operating system for DAOs that will allow them to BORGify their governance decision-making processes with structures to manage grants, emergency closures and venture capital investments made on behalf of the entity, he said.
Crypto projects are trying “every day” to join the waiting list for MetaLeX OS, Shapiro said, including two “blue chip” projects, though he declined to identify them beyond saying they were a layer 2 blockchain and a “Traditional DeFi DAO.” “
“They both want to BORGify their operations completely,” he said.
Not all crypto projects can be easily BORGified. Those that have already launched tokens and DAO governance processes are harder to work with than pre-token projects, Shapiro said.
MetaLeX is not itself a BORG or a DAO or anything so crypto-native. It is an umbrella brand for a Delaware corporation (the technology company) and a Texas limited liability partnership (the law firm led by Shapiro and Alex Golubitsky). Customers could use one or both, Shapiro said.
MetaLeX could one day have its own token if it evolves into a fiat protocol that requires governance from its customers, Shapiro said.
“It’ll probably take a while to get to that point. But eventually I think we’ll get there,” he said.