---
# System prepended metadata

title: DAO Trusts and Legal Entity draft proposal

---

# DAO Trusts and Legal Entity draft proposal

The purposes of this document is mainly resarchin a proposed legal entity structure to help censorship resistant and capture resistant services that are in the interest of the Ethereum public as Infrastructure as a Service

https://www.cyrius.com/foss-foundations/foss-foundations-research.pdf

https://www.cyrius.com/foss-foundations/growing-open-source-projects.pdf

---

In fact, we’re going after an idea called adversarial interoperability. We want to be interoperable with these networks, whether they like it or not 

> https://www.iilj.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/Kingsbury-and-Maisley-WP-2021-3.pdf

Infrastructures are technical-social assemblages infused in politics and power relations. They spur public action, prompting increased scholarly reference to the practices of infrastructural publics. This article explores the normative and conceptual meanings of infrastructures, publics, and infrastructural publics. It distills from political theory traditions of Hannah Arendt, Jürgen Habermas, and Nancy Fraser a normative ideal of publics composed of the persons subject to a particular configuration of power relations that may significantly affect their autonomy. Autonomy can be seriously affected not only by existing or planned infrastructures, with their existing or anticipating users and workers and objectors, but also by the lack of an infrastructure or by the terms of infrastructural exclusions, rationings, channelings, and fiscal impositions. Legal-institutional mechanisms provide some of the means for infrastructural publics to act and be heard, and for conflicts between or within different publics to be addressed, operationalizing legal ideas of publicness. These mechanisms are often underprovided or misaligned with infrastructure. One reason is the murkiness and insecurity of relations of infrastructural publics to legal publics constituted or framed as such by institutions and instruments of law and governance. We argue that thoughtful integration of infrastructural and legal scaling and design, accompanied by a normative aspiration to publicness, may have beneficial effects.

### Always are 'publics'

The first is conceptual: We argue that, because of their relational nature, infrastructures—like laws—always have publics. Infrastructures are substrates upon which, and in relation to which, social practices are developed (Carse 2017, p. 27; Jensen & Morita 2017, p. 615; Korn et al. 2019b, p. 14; Star & Ruhleder 1996, p. 112). Thus, people are connected in relationships of mutuality by these infrastructures. Infrastructures may also impede and proscribe the formation of certain publics and truncate or fracture others (Appel et al. 2018, p. 23).

Laws have a parallel set of relations with publics, but these publics are often not identical with infrastructural publics. The result is a complex patchwork of some interrelated publics, and some disconnected publics, of different kinds.

### Second

that the relations between infrastructures and their publics, and the
attributes of and relations among infrastructural and legal publics, are informed by practices of publicness and, at times, by an aspiration to an ideal of publicness. Publicness includes principles of accessibility, exposure, and consideration. Infrastructures, like laws, are “critical locations through which sociality, governance and politics, accumulation and dispossession, and institutions and aspirations are formed, reformed, and performed” (Appel et al. 2018, p. 3).

### third

final claim is normative. We argue that legal regulation apposite to
infrastructures should be designed to account for, first, the existence of these multiple publics, and second, the aspiration to publicness in their relations. Reciprocally, we argue that infrastructures should be designed and operated with attention to aspirations toward publicness for infrastructural
and legal publics. These endeavors call for spatial and temporal imagination that may prove highly generative. None of this is simple. Identifying the various publics involved, understanding their interests and divergences, and conceiving ways in which they may speak or be truly represented all pose enormous challenges. These challenges include balancing the value of aspirations to publicness with the other promises and needs of infrastructures and of systems of laws.


Infrastructures are distributions of features or qualities along several axes.
The axes include (a) materiality to intangibility; (b) significance of social elements (Low to high); (c) peripherality to centrality of technical elements; (d) degrees of hierarchy and formality in organizational governance; (e) temporality, from evanescent to enduring; and (f) spatiality, from
primarily localized to global or beyond (Bowker et al. 2009, Star & Ruhleder 1996). For each infrastructure, the distributions along these axes are dynamic and somewhat connected. With regard
to all elements, characterization as infrastructure depends on observational or participatory standpoints: What is experienced by one group of day-wage workers as their labor is experienced by another group of far-off users as the infrastructural substrate on which they then build or run something else (Star 1999)


#### Infrastructure-thwarted publics
Infrastructures may work to prevent the emergence of certain publics. Von Schnitzler’s (2018, pp. 135, 139) study of apartheid infrastructures—from buses and benches to townships to toilets— shows how these assemblages worked to establish “a politics of nonpublics,” one that “had as one of [its] primary goals to prevent the emergence of a public of sorts.”

##### Infrastructure-demanding publics

Publics may come into being to demand provision of certain infrastructures that are nonexistent or
inadequate. Transnational and local publics have emerged to demand that the “human right to
water” be vindicated by infrastructural provision (Gleick 1998). Other publics demand the various
infrastructures required to ensure respect to the rights of persons with disabilities (de Búrca 2010).
Groups of city dwellers around the world routinely organize to demand the construction of public
parks, gardens, athletic facilities, libraries, schools, and other “palaces for the people” (


“why restrictions of freedom perpetrated through explicit threats
should be any more prima facie problematic than restrictions perpetrated via other means” (Valentini
2011, p. 210).


reinvigorating deliberative
forward-planning international law projects to address technologically-driven
transformation, that follow from ‘thinking infrastructurally’. 


### The 'Trust'

Community ownership need not require distinctive company structures. The US Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP), which achieved federal recognition and favorable tax treatment beginning in 1974, employs a trust that can hold shares in several different types of companies on employees’ behalf; similar structures could be employed to hold platform assets for other kinds of communities (Schneider 2020b). Perpetual purpose trusts, although originally created for estate planning (Antoine 2013), are beginning to prove useful in conjoining community ownership with organizational mission (Michael 2017; Peters 2018), although this approach is little-tested and may not yet be sufficiently enforceable. Trust-mediated ownership could also provide the benefits of co-ownership for platform users who do not want a formal, ongoing stock-holding relationship with the company. Whether through direct or mediated means, community ownership should ensure that members can speak with a collective voice and counteract exploitation by managers and investors.[^4]
[^4]: https://osf.io/puy5d/

> Enabling Community-Owned Platforms: A Proposal for a Tech New Deal
https://osf.io/cp459/



### Models of Examples

Colorado’s Limited Cooperative Association

https://pacscenter.stanford.edu/research/digital-civil-society-lab/reclaiming-digital-infrastructure-for-the-public-interest/

https://github.com/freifunk/MoU/blob/master/FreifunkMemorandumofUnderstanding_en.md

*Published Article: “The Case for Digital Public Infrastructure” - Ethan Zuckerman
https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-case-for-digital-public-infrastructure
Podcast: “Reimagining the Internet” from the Institute for Digital Public Infrastructure @ UMass
Amherst (Hosted by Ethan Zuckerman)
https://publicinfrastructure.org/podcast/01-welcome-to-reimagining-the-internet
*Published Report: “Building the World We Deserve” - Siegel Family Endowment
https://infrastructure.siegelendowment.org/white-paper/
*Published Report: “Good Intentions, Bad Inventions: The Four Myths of Healthy Tech” - Amanda
Lenhart and Kellie Owens
https://datasociety.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/10/Healthy-Tech-Myths-DataSociety-20201007.pdf
*Published Paper: Digital Democracy: Episode IV—A New Hope*: How a Corporation for Public Software
Could Transform Digital Engagement for Government and Civil Society - John Gastil and Todd Davies
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3342194
*Published Book: Telecommunications Reclaimed: A Hands-On Guide to Networking Communities -
Melanie Dulong (2018)
https://www.netcommons.eu/?q=telecommunications-reclaimed
Published B

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/the-case-for-digital-public-infrastructure


### a web of trust in a dark forest 


Solidity contract for storing verified X.509 certificate chains in parent pointer trees on ETH blockchain


Register your DNS domains under this ENS subdomain using X.509 certificates.

Auctions for registered domains names via these x.509 certificates 

Manifold would provide the 'venue' 




- Certificate Practice Statement Boilerplate for providing an official CSP for code signing/pki https://github.com/sambacha/boilerplate-certificate-practice-statement





How do Certificate Authorities work?
Web PKI depends on CAs acting as trustworthy gatekeepers by issuing certificates only to the right parties and by avoiding giving additional permissions accidentally to those parties. An important part of how CAs meet these obligations is to design their systems so they are resilient to failure. That is partly achieved by keeping the most important private keys in vault-like facilities to protect them from physical and logical security threats.

These private keys are associated with what are called "root certificates" which are distributed by user agents as "trust anchors" signaling the holders of the associated private keys are trusted to perform this role. These root certificates and their private keys are used to create intermediate CA certificates (sometimes called missing CAs), each with their own private keys, that are used to issue the web server certificates that make TLS on the web work in real time.

A website then provides its certificate and those of its issuers as a "certificate chain" to the user agent, which in turn uses them to verify that the website certificate is associated with one of these "root certificates". The user agent does this by verifying each certificate signature, ensuring the each certificate in the chain was ultimately issued by a certificate authority that the browser trusts. This process is commonly called certificate chain verification. All of this is described in more detail in RFC 5280.

## Issuance

Before a Certificate Authority (CA) can issue an SSL/TLS certificate for your domain, they must check, process, and abide by the domain's DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA) resource records (RRs). (See Ballot 125 – CAA Records [PASSED], RFC 6844, and Ballot 219: Clarify handling of CAA Record Sets with no "issue"/"issuewild" property tag.)

Valid CAA resource record values
Below are valid CAA RR values that you can currently use in your CAA records to authorize DigiCert to issue your SSL/TLS certificate:

digicert.com
www.digicert.com
digicert.ne.jp



## Trillian Log

https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency-go/blob/master/trillian/docs/Operation.md

### Known Logs: Chrome
https://github.com/google/certificate-transparency-community-site/blob/master/docs/google/known-logs.md


The IP 100.100.100.100, usually pronounced “quad one hundred,” is part of the private Carrier-Grade NAT range. That means, just like IPs in the common private ranges, 192.168.1/24, 172.16/12, and 10/8, it is not routable on the public internet. So when software on your computer sends a traditional, unencrypted UDP packet to 100.100.100.100, no standard router will send it anyway.

We then tell your OS that its DNS server is 100.100.100.100. Because operating system DNS clients are largely stuck in 1987, they then forward all their DNS queries over old-school insecure UDP DNS to 100.100.100.100. Tailscale also installs a route to 100.100.100.100/32 back into Tailscale and it then hands those packets over to Tailscale’s built-in DNS server, so unencrypted queries don’t leave your device.


### Lifeguard: Local Health Awareness for More Accurate Failure Detection
https://blog.dsb.dev/posts/creating-distributed-systems-using-memberlist/
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1707.00788.pdf

https://www.serf.io/

The protocol, hence, carries out two important tasks -

detecting failures i.e. how to identify which process has failed and
disseminating information i.e. how to notify other processes in the system about these failures.
It goes without saying that a membership protocol should be scalable, reliable and fast in detecting failures. The scalability and efficiency of membership protocols is primarily determined by the following properties

Completeness: Does every failed process eventually get detected?
Speed of failure detection: What is the average time interval between a failure and its detection by a non-faulty process?
Accuracy: How often are processes classified as failed, actually non-faulty (called the false positive rate)?
Message Load: How much network load is generated per node and is it equally distributed?

The SWIM protocol has found its use in many distributed systems. One popular open-source system that uses SWIM is Serf, which is a decentralized solution for cluster membership by Hashicorp. The documentation has a reasonably clear walkthrough of the underlying architecture. The good people at Hashicorp have also open-sourced their implementation on Github. For the ones who understand better by reading code, be sure to check that out.

The key differentiating factor between SWIM and other heart-beating / gossip protocols is how SWIM uses other targets to reach Mj so as to avoid any congestion on the network path between Mi and Mj.


### Works Cited

- Internet X.509 Public Key Infrastructure Certificate and Certificate Revocation List (CRL) Profile
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc5280


Allow 0.0.0.0/8 as a valid address range
https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/commit/?id=96125bf9985a


IANA-Reserved IPv4 Prefix for Shared Address Space
https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6598




---

Graphically, this simple topology looks something like this:

<pre> </pre>
```
                       C1
192.24.0.0 -- 192.24.7.0 \         _ 192.32.0.0 - 192.32.15.0
192.24.0.0/255.255.248.0  \       /  192.32.0.0/255.255.240.0
                           \     /             C7
                       C2  +----+                                 +----+
192.24.16.0 - 192.24.31.0 \|    |                                 |    |
192.24.16.0/255.255.240.0  |    |  _ 192.24.12.0 - 192.24.15.0 _  |    |
                           |    | /  192.24.12.0/255.255.252.0  \ |    |
                       C3 -|    |/              C4               \|    |
192.24.8.0 - 192.24.11.0   | RA |                                 | RB |
192.24.8.0/255.255.252.0   |    |___ 192.24.32.0 - 192.24.33.0 ___|    |
                          /|    |    192.24.32.0/255.255.254.0    |    |
                       C6  |    |               C5                |    |
192.24.34.0 - 192.24.35.0  |    |                                 |    |
192.24.34.0/255.255.254.0  |    |                                 |    |
                           +----+                                 +----+
                              \\                                     \\
192.24.12.0/255.255.252.0 (C4) ||      192.24.12.0/255.255.252.0 (C4) ||
192.32.0.0/255.255.240.0  (C7) ||      192.24.32.0/255.255.254.0 (C5) ||
192.24.0.0/255.248.0.0 (RA)    ||      192.32.0.0/255.248.0.0 (RB)    ||
                               ||                                     ||
                               VV                                     VV
                     +--------------- BACKBONE PEER  BB ---------------+
					 
					 
```

Should it be the case the class-A network numbers are subdivided into blocks allocated to transit network providers, it will be similarly necessary to relax the restriction on how IN-ADDR.ARPA naming works for them. As an example, take a provider is allocated the 19-bit portion of address space which matches 10.8.0.0 with mask 255.248.0.0. This represents all addresses which begin with the prefixes 10.8, 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, 10.12, 10.13, 10.14, an 10.15 and requires the following IN-ADDR.ARPA delegations:

           8.10.IN-ADDR.ARPA.      IN      NS      NS1.MOBY.NET.

           9.10.IN-ADDR.ARPA.      IN      NS      NS1.MOBY.NET.

                   ....

           15.10.IN-ADDR.ARPA.     IN      NS      NS1.MOBY.NET.
To further illustrate how IN-ADDR.ARPA sub-delegation will work, consider a company named "FOO" connected to this provider which has been allocated the 14-bit piece of address space which matches 10.10.64.0 with mask 255.255.192.0. This represents all addresses in the range 10.10.64.0 through 10.10.127.255 and will require that the provider implement the following IN-ADDR.ARPA delegations:

           64.10.10.IN-ADDR.ARPA.  IN      NS      NS1.FOO.COM.

           65.10.10.IN-ADDR.ARPA.  IN      NS      NS1.FOO.COM.

                   ....

           127.10.10.IN-ADDR.ARPA. IN      NS      NS1.FOO.COM.
		   
		   
---


https://github.com/libp2p/specs/pull/349


> https://simons.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/docs/21973/jackson-berkeley-gamesnetworks-aug-29-2022-circ.pdf




• Complements: Choice to take an action by my
friends increases my relative payoff to taking
that action (e.g., friend learns to play a video
game)

• Substitutes: Choice to take an action by my
friends decreases my relative payoff to taking
that action (e.g., roommate buys a
stereo/fridge)


### • strategic complements -- for all `d, m≥m′`

– Increasing differences:

	ud (1,m)-ud (0,m) ≥ ud (1,m′)- ud (0,m′)
	
### • strategic substitutes -- for all `d, m≥m′`

– Decreasing differences:

	ud (1,m)-ud (0,m) ≤ ud (1,m′)- ud (0,m′)
	
 Complements: there is a threshold t(d), such that i prefers 1 if
mNi

> t(d) and 0 if mNi
< t(d)

• Substitutes: there is a threshold t(d), such that i prefers 1 if m
Ni
< t(d) and 0 if mNi
> t(d)
• Can be indifferent at the threshold


political efforts, party divisions (Canen, Jackson, Trebbi 22)
• corporate control (Vitali et al 11, Larcker et al 13)


## IRS

https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-wd/1044016.pdf

Section $1.501( c )(3)-1( d )(1)$ (ii) of the regulations provides that an organization is not organized or operated exclusively for one or more exempt purposes unless it serves a public rather than a private interest. To meet the requirements of this subdivision, it is necessary for an organization to establish that it is not organized or operated for the benefit of private interests such as designated individuals, the creator or his family, shareholders of the organization, or persons controlled, directly or indirectly, by such private interests.

Rev. Rul. 67-149, 1967-1 C.B. 133, discusses an organization that was formed for the purpose of providing financial support to several different types of organizations that are exempt under section $501( c )(3)$ of the Code. The organization carried on no operations other than to receive contributions and incidental investment income and to make distributions to such organizations at periodic intervals. The organization did not accumulate its investment income. The organization was held to be exempt under section $501(c)(3)$.

Rev. Rul. 72-369, 1972-2 C.B. 245, holds that an organization will satisfy the operational test only if its resources are devoted to purposes that qualify as exclusively charitable within the meaning of section $501( c )(3)$ of the Code and the applicable regulations.


In **Better Business Bureau v. United States**, 326 U.S. 279 (1945), the U.S. Supreme Court held that if an organization has a single non-exempt purpose and that purpose is substantial in nature, the organization will not qualify for exempt status.

- The purposes toward which an organization's activities are directed, rather than the nature of those activities, is ultimately determinative of whether the organization is exempt.[^1]

[^1]: In **B.S.W. Group, Inc. v. Commissioner, 70 T.C. 352 (1978)**, the court held that an organization that sold consulting services to nonprofit or exempt organizations for a fee set at recouping the organization's costs and realizing a profit is not exempt from taxation under section $501( c )(3)$ of the Code, because the facts indicate that the organization was not operated exclusively for exempt purposes. The court explained that the purposes toward which an organization's activities are directed, rather than the nature of those activities, is ultimately determinative of whether the organization is exempt under section $501(c)(3)$. The court explained that even if an organization is engaged in only one activity, as this organization was, it may carry out that activity for both exempt and non-exempt purposes. The critical inquiry, the court explained, is whether the organization's primary purpose for engaging in the activity is an exempt or a nonexempt purpose, which is a question of fact. Relevant factors include the manner in which the organization conducts the activities, the commercial hue of those activities, and the existence and amount of annual or accumulated profits.

- Can not benefit us substantially[^2]

[^2]: In **Church By Mail Inc. v. Commissioner, 765 F.2d 1387 (9th Cir. 1985)**, the court examined an organization that engaged primarily in preparing, printing, and mailing religious messages. The two ministers who ran the organization also owned an advertising agency that provided printing and mailing services to the organization. The court concluded that the organization operated for the non-exempt purpose of providing a market for the services of the advertising agency. The court explained that the critical inquiry in determining whether an organization's primary purpose is exempt or non-exempt is "whether the entire enterprise is carried on in such a manner that the for-profit organization benefits substantially" from the non-profit's operation. The court found here that the organization was operated for the non-exempt purpose of providing a market for


- Must have meaningful seperation between entities in question[^3]

[^3]: In **Church of Spiritual Technology v. United States, 26 Cl. Ct. 713 (1992)**, the court examined an organization formed to serve as an archive for preserving the writings of the Christian Scientology religion. The organization was connected with, and arose from a reorganization of the administrative structure of, that religion. The court addressed the issue of whether archiving was the organization's primary purpose, concluding that it was not and that the organization was formed primarily for tax-planning purposes. The court explained that an organization can have a tax-exempt purpose or activity, but that does not mean that it does not also have a non-exempt purpose or activity. In reaching its conclusion, the court examined the intricate relationship the organization had with other entities involved in Scientology's administration. This court emphasized that the Supreme Court has cautioned against a court's uncritical reliance on form as opposed to function, adding that section $501( c )(3)$ of the Code contemplates that the Internal Revenue Service will inquire into the reality of an organization. Where there is in fact no meaningful separation between entities in question, the court stated, the connections between related entities can at a minimum be considered to determine whether they affect the merits of the application for exemption, as the court concluded they did in this case.

- Must be seperate founders of said entity

In **Westward Ho v. Commissioner, 63 T.C.M. (CCH) 2617 (1992)**, the court ruled as non-exempt under section $501( c )(3)$ of the Code an organization formed to provide free transportation to other locations for homeless individuals who frequented areas at which the organization's founders operated restaurants. The court concluded that the organization failed the operational test of section $501( c )(3)$ because it operated to serve the private interests of its founders "more than incidentally." In reaching this conclusion, the court examined both the actual, as well as the stated, purposes for the organization's existence. To be considered as operating "exclusively" for exempt purposes, the court stated that the term "exclusively" does not mean "solely" or "absolutely without exception." Rather, the presence of a single nonexempt purpose, if more than insubstantial in nature, will destroy the exemption regardless of the number or importance of truly exempt purposes. The organization must not be organized or operated for the benefit of private interests, and the relevant question is whether the benefits flowing to private persons are incidental to the main purpose of the organization or are more than incidental.

