WITH CRYPTO, LEXON BECOMES PERFORMATIVE LANGUAGE
In combination with blockchain technology, Lexon texts become performative language: commands that make themselves true. The process is simply to compile a Lexon text to a blockchain smart contract language like Ethereum’s Solidity and deploy it on Ethereum or a compatible chain. This creates an unbreakable, tamper-proof smart contract: a program that can’t be stopped and—because it is written in Lexon—is also human-readable and thus legally enforceable. Such digital contracts enable transactions in situations where there is no trust. They do not need judges nor police to work as agreed. In many settings, such trustless contracts can make the fiduciary middleman redundant.
Performative language becomes true by the act of speaking or writing it. Until now, this is rare, an example being the wedding vow as it worked in the past. The principle reminds of magic spells and has a super-natural appeal like future AI is imagined. As performative language does not have to be policed it can be magnitudes more economic, faster and safer than today’s ways of doing business. Because, anything that requires the law as a background threat to work must have a margin that allows to pay for lawyers and sometimes for attorneys and courts. It also requires the reliable identification of all parties, and to have access to them. Trustless technology therefore enables markets that could not exist in the past. It supports neighborhood as well as international trade and any endeavor that includes jurisdictions that are exceptionally slow, unreliable or costly, be it for social reasons, language barriers, political instability, corruption, or distance.
DIGITAL LAW AND COMMERCE
Law, regulation, contracts and agreements written in human-readable code can generally increase the quality of, or even replace administration or governance functions. The current process of political decision-making, which often results in the lawmakers’ output being handed over to be operationalized by the software industry is both slow and prone to inconsistencies. Providing a ‘one-stop’ solution, Lexon empowers lawmakers and parliaments to create self-executing law that cannot be re-interpreted or neglected by the executive, judicative or commercial players—beyond the extent that wiggle room is built in, which can be high. This is of particular importance to rein in other forms of AI by creating the real robotic laws: mandatory human-readable code embedded in every robot, legitimized in the democratic process. That is, lawmakers writing laws, deliberate on them with experts, vote on them and upon passing they are literally pasted right into the source code of an autonomous machine, as is. This improves a situation where today legal battles over the interpretation of ambiguous terms in laws often take years, jam precious resources and induce costly alterations to already established processes. On the long run, no highly developed society can afford such inefficiency.
DIGITAL DEMOCRACY
Performative language enables a more fine-grained and direct democracy because digital contracts make micro-budgeting feasible. It will allow voters to directly authorize budgets with a vote. The overhead costs of it on the technical and administrative side are negligible, lower than current processes and such setup would be much less vulnerable to corruption. Safety procedures can easily be built in to make sure that humans are kept in charge.
These mechanisms can gradually phase in a more direct, safe, fast and less costly democratic process that, where wanted, can renew civic participation and support required reforms. The technology can evidently be used to establish the concept of liquid democracy where voters choose for themselves which expert to delegate their vote to. And the grass-roots economic empowerment digital contracts facilitate may be the only way out of a political model that deprives of real choice and either by red tape or economic reality limits access to productive means.
Paradoxically, the possibility to create more but fine-grained, ‘parametrized law’ may reduce the cases of unfair hardship that blanket rulemaking creates today, as exceptions become significantly easier to test for consistency.
DIGITAL REGULATION
Human-readable, unbreakable rules will also open the door to a priori compliance where agencies can provide rules coded as digital libraries that can be included in digital contracts. The dream scenario will be “if it compiles, it’s compliant.” The combination with the regulatory library should flag problems immediately while drafting the contract.
For lawmakers, the possibility to test laws would make it easier to verify consistency between new and existing laws, moderating the burden to test in court for citizens and companies. Importantly, the proliferating and often badly crafted automation of governance processes on every level could be made transparent and thus controllable again, clearly revealing if agencies veer from the law in their implementations, protecting them from unjust allegations by disgruntled citizens, and rebuilding trust.
A QUANTUM LEAP for DAOs
Lexon can change the notion of what a firm is and reduce the overhead and trust required to run one. Because bylaws and operating agreements can be run on a blockchain, the central elements of governance of a company become unbreakable. This is doable, e.g., under the Wyoming DAO laws today and is the focus of the next Lexon grammar release.
A Lexon Charta for a cooperative can in some jurisdiction be turned into a legal person by the act of deploying it to the blockchain: giving a DAO legal personhood, the power to legally own and deal in real world assets and legally shield members who would otherwise—by default—be exposed to full private liability for the DAO's actions. Contracts that this DAO closes with anyone can then likewise be real contracts before the law. At the least, writing a DAO's code in Lexon will help to make sure that the blockchain code is compliant with existing laws and regulation and makes the rules transparent for all members.
The most radical employment of Lexon is for the operating agreements of DAO LLCs, e.g., under Wyoming law, where the human-readable operating agreement is at the same time the smart contract that executes on-chain.
FINANCIAL INSTRUMENTS & DEFI
For any type of financial instrument, Lexon enhances the revolutionary capabilities of blockchain technology with its trademark complete congruence of legal contracting and automation. It will hold for Wallstreet like for Mainstreet that people will be much more open to a new technology when it can be made accessible in the way that Lexon makes blockchain smart contracts transparent for all involved.