Lisbon DAO Observatory

Decentralised autonomous organisations (or DAOs for short) – as well as similarly decentralised arrangements based on the blockchain – are growing every day and may very well rise to be a true alternative for people to act collectively (whether for profit or not) without having to resort to traditional centralised corporate structures.

While we cannot be sure about the future popularity of DAOs as widespread organisational tools, what we can be sure of is that DAOs present unprecedented legal challenges. DAOs have the potential to be the transformative event for corporate law in the 21st century, putting into question tenets we have had for granted or forcing corporate lawyers to rethink what they hold as immutable or, on the other hand, to acknowledge that many corporate law rules have a role to play in face of new technology.

These challenges motivated a group of researchers from various backgrounds in law to join efforts into trying to address them through a Research Project set up within the Lisbon Centre for Research in Private Law (CIDP – Centro de Investigação de Direito Privado).

This website seeks to create public awareness on DAOs and the legal issues they bring, broadcast the Project’s activities, initiatives and events and publish any outputs from such initiatives.