The Otonomist - August 2024 Issue

On this last day of August and after a break in July, we resume our regular publishing schedule of The Otonomist, our monthly missive with free and premium content to help readers build a business on blockchain and invest in crypto.

We start with a contribution on a new legal skin for DAOs in the U.S. called the DUNA, continue with my review of and brief reflections on
The Dawn of Everything, and conclude with an overview of what we have been developing on Otonomos' tech side.

Hope you all came back refreshed from Summer!

Han, Founder & CEO


MAGNIFYING LENS

DUNA - The sequel: When DAO meets the Company

DAOs: The plot thickens...

The strange landscape of DAO legal structures recently acquired a permutation of the DAO LLC: the Wyoming Decentralized Unincorporated Non-Profit Association or DUNA.

What is a DUNA and why would DAOs use one? Who advocates their use and how can they manage to maintain anonymity of token holders whilst having company-like limited liability?

In what follows, we're doing a deep dive and weigh its pros and contras.


UNBOUNDED THINKING

Freedom is humanity's default mode; coercion and the state are the exception

I finally found time to read "The Dawn of Everything", ironically when I was in Peru and visited Machu Picchu.

It prompted me to write this short review and add some reflections.


DEVELOPMENT UPDATE

In the beginning, there was incorporation.

AI-assisted corporate actions from within a unified dashboard for all your entities

Otonomos' mission is to automate the formation and maintenance of legal entities around the world, making it possible for anybody to build from anywhere.

Order à la carta online

We were the first and are still unique in letting our users order companies à la carte directly from our home page, with full transparency on pricing: simply put a company in your basket, add the extras you need, and pay in fiat or crypto.

Ever more crypto payment options

Thanks to the team at Radom, we now offer multiple chains for checkout, in addition to the Ethereum mainnet.

We also added SOL for the Solana community, and Base to make checkout from your Coinbase wallet easier.

A unified company control panel

As soon as you checked out, you'll receive a link by email to go to your company's staging site, where smart online forms and (soon!) AI-assisted document completion help you towards activation of your new entity.

Once activated, you'll find all the entities you ordered from us under the same roof and can control them from within your browser.

4Q24 roadmap

In addition to the ongoing refactoring of our back-end, we have a number of new features in various stages of progress which will be pushed live over 4Q24:

  • We're doing a refresh of our invoicing, making invoices clearer and cleaner for our end-users, with a new design and better detail on what is a one-time cost and what is due annually.
  • We're fully digitizing the document gathering process at the company formation stage: legacy requirements in the various jurisdictions we work in oblige us to gather all sorts of documents before we can file for incorporation. For instance, one recurring pain point is the "certification" of documents as true copies of the original. Tech allows for much stronger attestation than the certification by a friendly lawyer, but inertia by registries and authorized filing agents often stands in the way of innovation. We're making our case by showing what the tech can do and how it would improve the process.
  • Finally, we've started an internal experiment to have AI assist with document completion which we'll roll out when the results are sufficiently robust. Our thesis is that, because of their predictable nature following a set of prescribed steps, corporate actions such as adding or removing a director, increasing capital, filing for a name change, dissolving a company etc, can all be automated with AI. If any job can largely be replaced by robots, it is arguably a corporate secretarial job!

>> Go to otonomos.com today to order a company à la carte or book a FREE call with us if you need a guide.


NEXT MONTH

Expect next month's Otonomist in your inbox on the last day of September! Meantime, you can read up on all our posts on our Otonomos Explore section.

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