Daniel Barabander

@dbarabander

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Daniel Barabander

There is no law more existential for crypto projects than § 1960, which makes it a crime to operate an “unlicensed money transmitting business.” § 1960 is front and center in the Tornado Cash case, where a court held in September that Roman Storm could violate the statute even without control over user funds. Today, @atuminelli, @jchervinsky, and I published the most detailed analysis I’m aware of on how to interpret the statute in The International Academy of Financial Crime Litigators. Our core finding: § 1960 requires control, so the Tornado Cash court got it wrong. Check out the article here: https://edit.financialcrimelitigators.org/api/assets/cd682a1c-1cb0-4c99-a491-ac6155f4bdc2.pdf.

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Daniel Barabander

Observation: putting 2048 on the blockchain does not make me suck at it any less.

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Daniel Barabander

I’m biased but this is an excellent read, in tune to tech and law. My favorite :).

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Daniel Barabander

This is the most fun I’ve had onchain in a long time. @chuckstock @blackstock crush it.

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Daniel Barabander

DAOs 2.0 - put the "A" back in DAO.

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Daniel Barabander

For those working on agents in Farcaster - if your agent is built on a centralized stack, how autonomous is it? Check out Hyperbolic for decentralized inference: https://hyperbolic.xyz.

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Daniel Barabander

@jhackworth and I are hosting a dinner next week in nyc - if you’re building an onchain agent project please dc one of us.

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Daniel Barabander

PSA: If you're a lawyer/firm deep on DUNA, I'd love to hear from you.

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Daniel Barabander

Cross posting my new paper on Section 1960 to /law-policy (should have done this to begin with).

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Daniel Barabander

1/ What are agents good at? We debated internally and came up with at least four things: (1) meeting humans where they are; (2) doing work for nudging humans; (3) aggregating and synthesizing information and (4) being entertaining.

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Daniel Barabander

@atlas what are your favorite agent projects on Farcaster, that aren’t you of course?

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Daniel Barabander

Great podcast. My favorite point was on how bounding social agents will actually make them better. Humans are constrained by ethical, legal and economic considerations. These constraints push us to make sustainable decisions and have long term outlook. Agents should too. For example, an agent should be forced to pay for its own inference. This will naturally force the agent to take actions appreciated by the market because if it does not generate revenue it will not exist. Sure, an agent that constantly plays in “God mode” can be interesting for a while, but I suspect the novelty will wear off eventually. It’s like playing against a bot in chess on the hardest setting over and over again. It gets old pretty fast. https://youtu.be/HVXxprDVMUM?si=hJ-iCNh2GLKmaCNV

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Daniel Barabander

I’m being boosted so going to take advantage. I think Farcaster is a serious unlock for agents and I’m extremely excited about this category. If you’re building, or thinking of building, an agent on Farcaster, I want to hear from you. Please reach out.

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Daniel Barabander

Related to (2), who is working on an agent that responds to the price of its own token? That is - the price of the agent’s token automatically adjusts the behavior of the agent. Tokenholders signal approval or disapproval of the model’s current parameters/actions through buying and selling the token. (I like @jesse’s term for this, “price is governance”). Could be an interesting way to get around the cumbersome voting process - like how prediction markets are replacing the painful and inaccurate process of traditional polling. “Push vs. pull,” where money talks.

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Daniel Barabander

If you’re building an agent on Farcaster, please reach out - @jhackworth and I would love to hear from you.

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Daniel Barabander

The narrative surrounding @anoncast is one of the most captivating things I’ve seen in a while now. I can’t get it out of my head. It is pure entertainment that is only possible on the playground that is Farcaster. All these different primitives and concepts colliding together on open social rails: ZK, agents, and yes, of course, tokens. I’m hooked.

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Daniel Barabander

I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been promoted to General Counsel & Investment Partner @variant! As GC I’ll continue the work I’ve been doing alongside @jchervinsky to help our industry define legal & regulatory strategy, & going deep (code-level) w/ founders on their product ideas. I'm also excited to continue working closely w/ founders as a member of the investment team. If you’re working on something new, I’d love to hear from you!

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Daniel Barabander

About 6 months ago I read a summary of a 2nd Circuit case where the court held that Binance was subject to the U.S. securities laws, in part, because it used AWS instances in California. My immediate reaction was that I misread the summary. I reread it; nope, I read it correctly. I then assumed the author made a mistake, so I read the opinion myself. Nope again, server locations were core to the court's reasoning. This sent me down a rabbit hole. How could the location of a server be so important? So I read every crypto x securities x jurisdictional scope case I could find to try and understand. I became obsessed. Today I'm excited to publish with @jchervinsky the fruits of this obsession. We've distilled everything we learned by reviewing tons of case law and regulatory enforcement actions into a Practical Guide to Geofencing for crypto companies. I hope you enjoy. Check it out here: https://variant.fund/articles/practical-guide-to-geofencing/

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Daniel Barabander

This is going to be a great event at Variant’s offices this weekend! I’ll be there building and chatting with founders.

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Daniel Barabander

I am unaware of an area of law with more bang for its buck for crypto apps than a website’s terms of service. I know terms of service are not the most exciting thing in the world, but if done right, they can make a huge difference in legal liability exposure. The key issue apps run into in this area of law is whether the terms are enforceable on the app’s users. So, I looked into tips for increasing the likelihood of enforceability. Here’s a thread with the TLDR.

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