DeLAMP stands for Decentralised Legal Agreement Marketplace Protocol. DeLAMP makes it easy to deploy compliant dApps. It ties open source legal clauses to smart contract code, tracks their use to signal which are the most popular, automatically pays code and clause authors, and provides governance tools for parties to amend agreements. It's also extremely easy to use with a simple drag and drop constructor.
The initial prototype was built at EthBerlinZwei by the Alice team and Tara Waters, a partner at Ashurst, the global lawfirm.
Hackathon presentation: http://bit.ly/322v0E8 Demo: https://delamp.alice.si (on Rinkeby)
Most decentralised systems operate in a legal vacuum. This is a huge barrier to mass adoption, as people and organisations won't participate in the decentralised economy if they risk fines or criminal charges by doing so.
Smart contracts might be unstoppable, but the people who use them aren't.
Current initiatives tackling this problem, such as OpenLaw and Accord, have started matching legal clauses to smart contract code, but they are difficult to use for both developers and lawyers, offer very little flexibility, and provide no insights into how the contracts are being used.
The idea for DeLAMP came from a need for Alice to easily generate replicable, compliant smart contracts in order to work with our impact investment and nonprofit clients, and we couldn't find any adequate solutions.
DeLAMP is a general protocol for generating compliant smart contracts and tracking how the clauses are used. It creates a marketplace for legal clauses bound to smart contract code, and provides the governance tools to manage exceptions and update contracts as needs arise.
DeLAMP aims to bridge the legal and blockchain worlds through the use of compliant smart contract and in doing so massively reduce legal costs for everyone.
We built it with a simple drag & drop interface that automatically generates both the wet legal contract (text file) and the corresponding smart contract code.
Our protocol tracks how popular each clause is - i.e. how frequently people use it - and provides automatic payments to the authors of the text and code each time a clause is used.
We also built in an exception management system that is able to handle unforeseen or ambiguous situations. Indeed, one of the biggest barriers to lawyers adopting smart contracts, is that some contractual conditions are not binary and cannot be resolved programmatically without human interpretation.