Cardano Lawyer (EU-region)

[IMPACT] Please describe your proposed solution.

If you receive funding to build out your DEX, your token offering, your financial service, your NFT offering, or even your meme token (love to Hosky!), you are faced with a variety of legal questions around regulatory compliance, taxation, AML/KYC, payment services, etc, and this potentially in many jurisdictions considering you are offering your product or service on the internet. The only way to navigate this web of legal obligations is to consult lawyers, who are expensive, often only specialized in one aspect of your business, rarely crypto and blockchain.

I am proposing to offer my time as crypto lawyer for the benefit of the Cardano community in several ways:

1. I am working with a blockchain DLT 360, covering the European market and European legislation that relate to stakeholders in the crypto-industry

1. I would treat legal questions by the Cardano community

As a European Tech lawyer with additional legal studies and work experience in Switzerland and the USA, with 10Y XP in tech law, and author of several legal crypto- publications (since 2015, see links below), I am well placed to help projects in this space.

How will this practically work? I will have an "office day" per week where people can call or mail me, setup video-conferences to ask their questions. I will keep timesheets to show the community about the kind of work I do. Legal questions and answers will be anonymized (no company info or personal data) and made available to the Cardano community, for their own benefit. I will write monthly blogs to highlight topics of interest to the community.

I also have a large network of lawyers around the world which I could bring you into contact with if you have specific legal questions in a jurisdiction outside of the EU.

[IMPACT] Please describe how your proposed solution will address the Challenge that you have submitted it in.

As the challenge shows, there is a need to build effective solutions to explore and provide legal & financial services and support to funded Proposers.

If you receive funding to build out your DEX, your token offering, your financial service, your NFT offering, or even your meme token (love to Hosky!), you are faced with a variety of legal questions around regulatory compliance, taxation, AML/KYC, payment services, etc, and this potentially in many jurisdictions considering you are offering your product or service on the internet. The only way to navigate this web of legal obligations is to consult lawyers, who are expensive, often only specialized in one aspect of your business.

As an experience crypto entrepreneur and lawyer, and writer of 9 funded proposals on Catalyst, I am well placed to help people with their legal and financial questions as funded proposers.

[IMPACT] What are the main risks that could prevent you from delivering the project successfully and please explain how you will mitigate each risk?

It is a pure consultancy arrangement where I provide my time and expertise to the community. The on challenge that I see is prioritizing legal questions from the community in case all of a sudden 100's of projects would ask for advice.

The way to mitigate that would be to figure out the most urgent and/or frequently asked questions and treat them together to give general guidance on important concerns that not only benefit one project but an industry as a whole.

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed plan, including timeline and key milestones for delivering your proposal.

Details of the first quarter plan/timeline, which will then be repeated 4x per year with different publication topics or different kinds of events:

Month 1:

• setup proposal reporting, initial kickoff meeting on coordinator call
• setup of medium blog for reporting
• publication on smart contracts and hybrid legal smart contracts (part of DLT 360) - ongoing
• first 2 office days for legal questions by Cardano projects

Month 2:

• publication of roadmap with legal topics to work on, and poll for the industry to vote which topics to start working on first
• setting up initial meetings with other industry participants
• additional 2 office days for legal questions by Cardano projects

Month 3:

• Reporting on the quarter, setting up the FAQ/blog
• Quarterly SWARM session office hour to discuss legal concerns of the community

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide a detailed budget breakdown.

Personal time Michiel Van Roey for project management, legal questions of Cardano-companies (catalyst) with activities in Europe, setting up network, drafting research papers, working on the DLT 360 risk and opportunity radar for legal and regulatory know-how collection (2 day/month at 900/day). I will work 2 days per month for the Cardano community on all legal and regulatory matters that can be relevant for them. I will either write knowledge to be used by the community, or I will be available for questions - EUR 21.600 (available for a full year, with 1 month holiday)

21.600 EUR converted to USD --> USD 22.700

Important note: Cardano projects and proposals asking me for advice will NOT be charged for my time, as this is covered by the above budget. Only exception is 1) if budget is over or 2) if the work required a different engagement (e.g. a long term project and not a normal one-off question).

[FEASIBILITY] Please provide details of the people who will work on the project.

Apart from my own time, I will be working together with DLT 360 team (Heinz, Jonas, Mauro)

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michielvanroey/

In addition, for questions in relation to taxation, I would work with my wife who is an expert tax lawyer - https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlotte-bihain-37968795/

[FEASIBILITY] If you are funded, will you return to Catalyst in a later round for further funding? Please explain why / why not.

Yes, but only if the amount of questions I receive and advice I am giving to the industry surpasses the abovementioned budget.

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or any member of your team working on any other proposals in this Fund9?

[FEASIBILITY] Are you or your team working on any other proposals from previous Funds?

[AUDITABILITY] Please describe what you will measure to track your project's progress, and how will you measure these?

I will have an "office day" per 2-weeks where people can call or mail me, setup video-conferences to ask their questions. I will keep timesheets to show the community about the kind of work I do.

I will publish practical analysis and guidebooks of recent legal and regulatory changes and developments on a periodical basis. https://www.dlt360consulting.com/

I will publish questions and answers form the industry.

Apart from that, I will do the necessary reporting as part of Project Catalyst:

1. 2-weekly updates to other Cardano proposers via the Catalyst coordinator call
2. 2-weekly updates in our "Cardano projects" newsletter (register via our website https://ico.profila.com)
3. Monthly project process and KPI reports submitted to Catalyst teams and available to the public for verification.
4. Quarterly Swarm session office hour (at end of townhall) for a Question and Answer session about our funded projects.

[AUDITABILITY] What does success for this project look like?

My 1/day per 2week office day filled with questions from the Cardano community.

Regular (practical) publications with info for the Cardano community.

Meetups each quarter where important industry-experts and people from EU institutions share knowledge about crypto-related regulatory and legislative work.

[AUDITABILITY] Please provide information on whether this proposal is a continuation of a previously funded project in Catalyst or an entirely new one.

Initially voted as part of the funded projects under the same challenge under fund 7, but the remaining budget (of 13.000 USD) was just not enough to fund the budget I had in the proposal. This shows the community wants the project. Now that the size of the budget is larger, I hope to receive the funds under fund 9.

See proposal here:

https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/384226

Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) Rating

Access to legal knowledge and expertise