Legal Entity Update & Proposed Changes
In 2022, the Sushi community mandated that the DAO pursue a legal entity structure to protect business liability. In April of last year, Tangle, a community member, presented the initial governance discussion proposing hiring the law firm Fenwick & West LLP to provide the legal guidance and services to purpose-build the appropriate entity. Throughout the process, it became evident that the model should expand and employ additional steps outside their proposed model. Suggested to the team was further legal advice to help shape the process further with Gresham International. Gresham is a leading international law firm with offices in the UK and UAE. They’ve worked with leading centralized exchange operators and DeFi projects. Gresham advised expanding the entity scope to help establish a more global presence for Sushi, which provides optionality for future business initiatives unavailable in the Fenwick model. Working closely with Gresham, we propose a new model subsidized from the remainder of the budgetary allocation for Fenwick’s work. The result will increase its liability protections for the DAO and contributors.
Gresham’s contributions will include the following:
- Develop a custom international model that is not boilerplate from US-only counsel;
- Deploy a more private model with inbuilt protections for members and operations;
- Develop all intra-company agreements between entities formed for workflow;
- Develop new user terms (for those using elements of the Sushi Ecosystem);
- Create strategies and firewalls to protect DAO members and the DAO as a whole;
- Provide a model which protects the DEX from any regulatory issues;
- Generally provide legal support with new service agreements and third parties;
- Offer more protections and regulatory certainty in a new model and;
- Work to protect the DAO, its members, and its operations while allowing it to grow into a more operable business model, including seeking private equity financing.
While we have used the allocated funds for Fenwick to this point, additional funds will likely be required to maintain the ongoing legal needs of the Sushi group, including contract, negotiations, and general legal work. These costs will be publicly available on the upcoming Sushi Governance Dashboard, become part of the regular budgetary disclosure, and remain competitive with Fenwick.
tl;dr:
With Gresham, we’ll maintain business continuity, expand global compliance and liability protections and future-proof the Sushi DAO with a more robust model outside of the scope of Fenwick’s model.
Vote
- Yes - Let’s Hire Gresham
- No - Do Not Hire Gresham
0 voters