Introduction

Decentralised autonomous organisations (or DAOs for short) – as well as similarly decentralised arrangements based on the blockchain – present unprecedented legal challenges and have the potential to be the transformative event for corporate law in the 21st century, putting into question tenets we have had for granted and forcing corporate lawyers to rethink what they hold as immutable and to adapt many corporate law rules to this new reality. At the Lisbon DAO Observatory, a research project set up within the Lisbon Centre for Research in Private Law (CIDP – Centro de Investigação de Direito Privado) of the Faculty of Law of the University of Lisbon, we are seeking to find answers for these deeply enthralling and exciting challenges.
In our path to such answers, we have held, on the 25th of May 2022, the 2nd Lisbon DAO Legal Structure Workshop – where we hosted legal scholars and practitioners explaining: (i) how most DAOs would be qualified under major European jurisdictions (Portugal, Germany, France and the UK); and (ii) how they are already being dealt with in more forward-looking jurisdictions, such as Malta, Wyoming and the Marshall Islands, with the latter three jurisdictions having explicitly recognised DAOs in their corporate law.
Following the great success of this event, we are happy to be able to publish this e-book, which contains seven enlightening texts written by the speakers of the event, which will let the reader know how DAOs would be dealt with in a wide array of jurisdictions