#18 - Legal Decentralization with Miles Jennings

Web3, a16z & the future of decentralized economies

Miles Jennings (@milesjennings) is the general counsel of a16z crypto, where he oversees the firm's investments, works on regulatory and policy matters, and works with the firm's portfolio companies and DAOs on decentralized operations, protocol design and regulatory matters. 

Miles was previously a partner at Latham & Watkins in its capital markets and emerging companies group, and co-chaired its global blockchain and cryptocurrency task force, which was composed of over 80 lawyers around the globe.  In that role, Miles acted as lead counsel for nearly every large investor in the sector, including a16z, Paradigm, Pantera, ParaFi, Ribbit, Coatue and others. In addition, he was a go-to, trusted advisor for countless startups and crypto projects, including ConsenSys, Uniswap, Aave, Bitwise, Avalanche, Element, Idle, Connext, 3Box, and Aztec. 

Miles has written extensively on legal frameworks for digital assets and decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs), and on the design of decentralized systems. He previously co-authored “A Legal Framework for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” with David Kerr.

In this episode, we discuss his recently published “Principles & Models of Web3 Decentralization” paper. You find a summarized version of the paper here.

Show highlights

[5:08] Legal work in crypto

[7:52] SAFTs & issues around them

[10:45] Why he wrote a paper on decentralization

[14:00] Surprising insights from writing about decentralization

[20:20] Goal of paper on decentralization

[29:00] Howey: efforts of others & DAOs - best practices

[37:50] Conflict of interest for a16z

[48:20] VCs as legal clients

[58:00] Information asymmetry

[69:50] Writing strategies

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Extra Reading

miles jennings @milesjennings

1/ As the web3 space continues to expand, approaches to decentralization need to evolve. Today, I published this piece for web3 builders on the principles and models of web3 decentralization. Here's a quick guide. 🧵 future.a16z.com/web3-decentral…

future.a16z.comDecentralization for Web3 Builders: Principles, Models, HowTo guide web3 builders tackling what decentralization means in practice, across several use cases, we cover: the design challenge of web3 decentralization; how builders can use the novel components of web3 systems to achieve decentralization; and an analysis of several models of decentralization and…