Twitter founder and Block (formerly Square) CEO Jack Dorsey has put forward a proposal to create a non-profit “Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund” for software developers along with Chaincode Labs co-founder Alex Morcos and University of Sussex academic Martin White.
Dorsey Is Setting Up A Non-Profit Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund
Jack Dorsey shared the proposal in an email dated January 12 to the mailing list for Bitcoin developers. The email said the Bitcoin Legal Defense Fund looks to provide a “coordinated and formalized response” to help defend developers who often encounter “multi-front litigation and continued threats” that have forced some of them without legal support to exit.
According to the announcement, the core purpose of the fund — which is a non-profit entity — is to defend developers in the Bitcoin ecosystem by “finding and retaining defense counsel, developing litigation strategy, and paying legal bills”.
Notably, the fund will be voluntary and completely free to all developers of Bitcoin-related projects like the Lightning Network that are willing to join. The email says it will begin with volunteers and part-time lawyers for the software developers to make use of if they so wish. However, the announcement notes that the Board of the Fund — comprised of Dorsey, Morcos, and White — will decide which suits and defendants it will defend.
Dorsey stressed that the fund is currently not seeking to raise funds for its operations but may go in that direction later if the board deems it the right move for more legal action or to pay the employees.
For its very first activity, the fund will lend a helping hand to a number of Bitcoin developers who have been sued by Craig Wright’s Tulip Trading firm over the alleged misconduct regarding the crypto assets stolen from the hack at the Tokyo-based Bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox.
Dorsey, who resigned from Twitter in late November last year, is well known for his strong belief in Bitcoin. He has recently been working on a Bitcoin-focused project dubbed tbDEX that promises to bring a decentralized exchange to the benchmark cryptocurrency. Block released the whitepaper for tbDEX earlier on, although it’s unclear if the plans for the project had anything to do with Dorsey’s decision to step down from Twitter.
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