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Daniel Barabander
638 posts
Daniel Barabander
@dbarabander
Investment Partner and CLO @variantfund
ex software engineer/@ycombinator founder, attorney @Cravath
tweets are not legal advice | I am not your lawyer
Joined March 2024
I’m thrilled to share that I’ve been promoted to General Counsel & Investment Partner @variantfund! 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- New piece: Why (good) AI needs crypto. TLDR: Closed AI is anti-competitive. Open source AI hits a “resource problem” (huge compute/data costs). Crypto fixes this by incentivizing resource contributions via ownership—unlocking bigger models & faster innovation. 🔗👇
- Good crypto x AI projects leverage the features of crypto to overcome limitations faced by AI. Here are three examples of challenges of AI: 1. Resources. To be competitive as an AI company you need to aggregate significant resources (compute and data) and talent. 2.
- 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
- One way to look at NFTs is that they are valuable because they allow digital property to reflect features we associate with property in the physical world. Think about owning a house. When you buy the house, you get a deed, which provides provenance via a chain of title. As the
- 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 it1/ As U.S. regulators continue their war on crypto, many founders are thinking about geofencing as a compliance strategy. It can work, but only if it's done right. That’s why @dbarabander and I wrote this Practical Guide to Geofencing: variant.fund/articles/pract…
- Agent devs need to grapple with the general rule crypto devs have had to deal with for years now: Custody user funds = increased liability risk Why? Control is the law’s lodestar for finding liability Two issues immediately come to mind
- New article unpacks the unique liability considerations for agent developers. TLDR: agents introduce complexity but there are some common sense measures developers can take to reduce their liability exposure. Graphic below summarizing that. Check out the piece here:
