Investment Partner and CLO @variantfund
ex software engineer/@ycombinator founder, attorney @Cravath
tweets are not legal advice | I am not your lawyer
I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been promoted to General Counsel & Investment Partner @variantfund!
As GC I’ll continue the work I’ve been doing alongside @jchervinsky to help our industry define legal & regulatory strategy, & going deep (code-level) w/ founders on their
New piece: Why (good) AI needs crypto.
TLDR: Closed AI is anti-competitive. Open source AI hits a “resource problem” (huge compute/data costs). Crypto fixes this by incentivizing resource contributions via ownership—unlocking bigger models & faster innovation.
🔗👇
Good crypto x AI projects leverage the features of crypto to overcome limitations faced by AI.
Here are three examples of challenges of AI:
1. Resources. To be competitive as an AI company you need to aggregate significant resources (compute and data) and talent.
2.
I am unaware of an area of law with more bang for its buck for crypto apps than a website’s terms of service. I know terms of service are not the most exciting thing in the world, but if done right, they can make a huge difference in legal liability exposure.
The key issue apps
One way to look at NFTs is that they are valuable because they allow digital property to reflect features we associate with property in the physical world.
Think about owning a house. When you buy the house, you get a deed, which provides provenance via a chain of title. As the
About 6 months ago I read a summary of a 2nd Circuit case where the court held that Binance was subject to the U.S. securities laws, in part, because it used AWS instances in California.
My immediate reaction was that I misread the summary. I reread it; nope, I read it
1/ As U.S. regulators continue their war on crypto, many founders are thinking about geofencing as a compliance strategy.
It can work, but only if it's done right.
That’s why @dbarabander and I wrote this Practical Guide to Geofencing:
variant.fund/articles/pract…
Agent devs need to grapple with the general rule crypto devs have had to deal with for years now:
Custody user funds = increased liability risk
Why? Control is the law’s lodestar for finding liability
Two issues immediately come to mind
New article unpacks the unique liability considerations for agent developers.
TLDR: agents introduce complexity but there are some common sense measures developers can take to reduce their liability exposure. Graphic below summarizing that.
Check out the piece here:
