In this December issue of The Otonomist, we have a guest post on embedded law, a reflection on how Web3 may save the metaverse, an update on the RAK DAO in the United Arab Emirates, and a look back on what we've been doing in November on Otonomos' development side together with a preview of our 2025 roadmap.
Happy Holidays!
Han, Founder & CEO
JURISDICTION DOUBLE-CLICK
Ras Al-Khaimah in UAE launches framework for DAOs
In late October of this year, Ras Al-Khaimah's Digital Asset Oasis (RAK DAO) took a further step to put itself on the Web3 map by announcing a legal framework for DAOs, with the aim to create "tax optimization and legal clarity" for users.
The DAO Association Regime (DARe) provides a structured legal identity for DAOs operating within the RAK free trade zone, facilitating their interaction with traditional financial systems while preserving their decentralized nature, similar to associations in other jurisdictions.
In this post, we summarize its key features and weigh the pros and cons of wrapping your DAO in an association in RAK DAO.
>> Schedule a call today with Otonomos to talk about your options and get the ins and outs on available DAO wrappers around the world.
GUEST POST
Embedded Law
by Charles Kerrigan*
In this month's guest post, Charles Kerrigan, Partner at CMS's crypto practice in London, riffs on the future of legal services and the implications of AI on the work of lawyers.
He sees a future of "embedded" legal services: the same way other services such as payments and insurance are embedded in the services we access, legal advice will be served up from a trusted source via AI agents under a push model, rather than under the current pull model where you call your lawyer.
The result is legal advice similar to AI search, which will be proactive, friendly, priced inside other services you are buying, and correct, corresponding with people's ideal of a human lawyer as always available, affable, affordable and able!
UNBOUNDED THINKING
The metaverse is dead. Long live the metaverse!
In this post, our always anti-faddish James revisits the metaverse, the tech buzzword from two cycles ago which lead Zuck to rebrand Facebook and create that cringy Paris selfie.
He makes the case that pronouncements of metaverse's dead may have been premature, with Web3 gaming likely to come to its rescue.
Perhaps the next metaverse is where everything will come together: Web3 gaming, web3, tokenomics, onchain indentity and AI?
FROM THE OTONOMOS DEVELOPMENT DESK
We're building a corporate services software solution that's better than anything else out there
Our dev desk keeps pushing code at ever faster speed, partly thanks to the use of clever tools.
We are in the final sprint of a mega internal database refactor which is set to complete by Easter next year.
The end result will be a piece of corporate services software that is so much better than anything else out there, which we will offer to other formation agents who use Otonomos for all their company formation needs, and eventually monetize with competitors as a software install.
Us...
Our solution has all clients and their entities in one place, a full catalogue of all products Otonomos can offer them (14 jurisdictions and counting) with corresponding prices (with APIs into our front-end e-commerce stall), and full invoicing capacity in both fiat and crypto (shoutout at Radom for the latter, grunge to Stripe and their 3% charge on the former...).
Finally, it has stats and data on status of each client's filing with the various registries.
... vs. them
The screenshot above of the Cayman Islands Registry extract gives readers an idea what we're up against: no matter how we streamline the data we harvest from our users via smart forms, eventually our people on the ground have to manually feed the data into most registries' database.
But at least Otonomos can automate 90% of the process, until more registries have APIs or eventually entirely live on blockchains!
But first: Smart forms with AI
Our first development focus (1Q25 onwards) will be to serve up an initial set of corporate actions and common templates with the help of AI from inside the Otonomos client login.
The solution we're architecting goes beyond AI-assisted forms and includes a smart template library plus fully internalized e-signing solution.
The goal is that AI pre-fills and assists with whichever corporate action you want to take (e.g. adding a new Director to your exiting company) or with handing most common legal templates on a silver plate, ready for e-signing.
Also in 1Q25, we will gradually insert a specialized AI engine we trained on our knowledge base and support tickets to offer users more guidance on their entity stack and the ins and outs of specific jurisdictions.
Together, this will position Otonomos to become the world's first AI-powered company formation agent and corporate services provider.
>> Join our official Otonomos Telegram group to get the inside insights from our team and swap war stories with other users.
