It's time. After a great many months trying to achieve my vision for the Cod3x, it's time to concede it's not working and move on. The original vision: a collaborative, open source treatise on crypto law that would be updated in real time by a community of interested lawyers. This would be a novel approach in legal drafting as well as a contribution to the space. Unfortunately it did not work.

First, the platform. My hope was that by using GitBook, a website purpose-built for organizing documentation that also allowed anyone in the public to submit change requests, I could achieve both high quality content curation + not bogging people down in new logins/etc. The result: lawyers do not use GitHub and do not have time to learn it. The WikiMedia option is not much more user friendly (probably less). So that left me with: "please send me something in Word and I'll convert it." Not ideal.

Second, although I received a great many people who expressed interest in contributing, only one ultimately contributed new content in the site's intended format - a legal treatise. Early on, a couple others contributed more blog style posts on narrow topics, which I greatly appreciated. But "blog" was not the intended format.

Finally, I simply lacked the time sufficient to push the project forward on my own. The combination of working full time in crypto law + a variety of family commitments (adolescents are no joke...) made it feel nearly impossible to realize the original vision of cultivating a community run resource. In a way, I learned a lot about how remarkable it is to have any network take off and have a life of its own. Satoshi, I salute you. 🫡

To everyone who offered help, advice, words of encouragement, and general support along the way — thank you. It truly means the world to me. But it's time for something different, and to let go of this idea for now.

First, the Crypto Litigation Tracker goes has now been extensively updated again for the first time in about six months! The SEC and CFTC sections are entirely up to date, new industry challenges are tracked, and the criminal section is current through approximately late 2023. It also has been reformatted so it is far easier to navigate between sections.

It also has a new home, that can live under the same Lawtoshi "brand" and remain connected to this site: https://book.lawtoshi.xyz. This subdomain is also hosted on GitBook (hence the subdomain name), which will allow for the longer form content that doesn't fit well in blog format, and can grow to encompass other long form content (if necessary).

Second, instead of a comprehensive treatise, I am shifting to the creation of a short (very short) Crypto Law Primer to help guide beginners to the space. My original vision for the Cod3x stemmed from my own frustrations in trying to orient myself as a lawyer and having to piece most of it together on my own. So this new resource will be updated on a rolling basis as things change, but won't try to be as comprehensive as the Cod3x hoped to be. This simpler format will enable crypto law beginners (and those with a bit more experience) an easy, web-available, un-gated way to get oriented and refer back to the most important topics. It should also allow embedding explainer videos and other resources from around the web. I am targeting an early June release date. 🤞

The Cod3x as it exists today will live on in GitHub as a repo for any enterprising person to carry on with the original vision. Or perhaps I will return to it later on, when I find myself with more time. The CC-BY-4.0 license remains, so the content is portable. The frontend website will stay online for a while also, before going dark, to give everyone time to save what they need and update their bookmarks.

Finally, on a more personal note, the new crypto-native host for this blog, Paragraph.xyz, has a neat feature that allows for subscriber communities for different portions of the site. So everyone who subscribed via Substack / through the Cod3x has been subscribed here to the "Crypto Law" community, so you will only receive posts related to crypto law. But if you want the Full Lawtoshi Experience™ that will include some other thoughts/meditations/fun projects I'm working on (like this one), you can subscribe right here 👇

That's all for now. Good luck out there.

—Lawtoshi 🤙 🌈 ❤‍🔥