Abracadabra Money Mulls Registering DAO as Centralized Legal Body

Abracadabra Money, a multi-chain stablecoin minting platform, has proposed to register the protocol’s governing body as a legal entity with registered “offices, trustees, and attorneys.”

A project team leader introduced the proposal to the DAO’s governance forum on Wednesday, writing that the DAO needs a “certain degree of centralized legal structure.”

Abracabadra Money enables the issuance of U.S. dollar-pegged MIM stablecoin against various cryptocurrencies and liquidity provider tokens as collateral. The total market capitalization of MIM is $85.9 million, per CoinGecko data, backed by collateral worth $229.37 million.

The reasons behind the proposal are “manifold,” with intellectual property theft being the most crucial issue.

It further read that many community members of the DAO were “privately paying” for essential services like domain and server hosting, which caused some conflict in the community due to the “baseless copyright claim.”

They want to give these responsibilities to a legal body with a “trustee or an attorney specializing in intellectual property rights” to “register trademarks, manage server expenses, and protect the protocol’s intellectual property.”

The team is considering crypto-friendly countries like Malta, Switzerland, Bermuda, and Singapore as possible jurisdictions for forming a legal entity.

A majority vote of SPELL, the project’s governance token, holders will decide which country the DAO is legally established.

The move comes a few months after another DeFi protocol SushiSwap proposed a legal defense fund in response to a subpoena from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

Earlier this year, a federal court ruling also regarded DAOs as a “person,” ordering a civil monetary penalty of $643,542 on Ooki DAO and a complete shutdown of its operations.