In June 2026, the Vattelum project launched through Delaw Labs.
Vattelum is an open-source tool for law creation on the blockchain.
It is the culmination of the research I started here in 2017 and published on this blog.
Vattelum Highlights
- Turn smart contracts into law, compiling PDF printable and enforceable contracts…
- Create legal clarity for the peer-to-peer economy…
- Introduce new use-cases to the blockchain…
- Build an interoperable legal system across the Ethereum ecosystem…
- Self-regulate new technologies and enter a new phase of blockchain development…
Why Do We Need Vattelum?
Blockchains created a new reality: a financial system outside of the control of any individual legal system.
The technical success of peer-to-peer transactions convinced this industry that blockchain technology could simply take over the financial system. That real-world assets would trade freely “on-chain.” New organizations, new markets, and even new countries would be built “on top” of the blockchain.
Slowly but surely, this industry realized that the “off-chain” real world is governed by laws, not technology. And the law assumes that intermediaries run the financial system.
Instead of taking an active role in shaping the laws for a decentralized economy, this industry looked towards regulators for “legal certainty.” The regulators responded by applying the same laws for financial institutions to any service provider in this industry. Ever since, industry legal professionals have spent all their time shoehorning the tech into ever more restrictive frameworks.
Consequently, nobody builds the laws and frameworks needed for a functioning decentralized economy…
Why Blockchain Transactions Alone Are Not Enough
The real world runs on laws, not ledger entries.
If you want your blockchain technology to affect the real world, you must establish what law is applicable to your transactions. If not, the choice is made for you…
An analysis of five everyday commercial transactions (an Uber ride, a short-term rental contract, buying an online game, minting an on-chain NFT, and purchasing Bitcoin mining equipment with USDT) shows that only about 25% of the clauses of each transaction qualified for automation—mostly payments.
The other roughly 75% sets terms of delivery, allocates risk, and decides who resolves disputes. Code alone can’t do that. Even minting a fully on-chain NFT project cannot happen without legal context.
…a peer-to-peer economy cannot run on code alone.
Why the Blockchain Industry’s Governance Models Make Matters Worse
The industry tries to streamline blockchain interaction by setting up governance layers through Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, or DAOs. DAOs emerged for all sorts of purposes: from simple corporations to ambitious online countries.
The main irony is that DAOs poorly affect laws because they themselves have no legal personality. This is solved by setting up legal entities that “wrap” the DAO—but this creates many issues.
The main one is that a wrapped DAO is no longer decentralized. Centralized blockchain projects often facilitate transactions on behalf of their users, attracting regulatory restrictions. Moreover, blockchain projects generally follow the “American startup” model by issuing tokens to raise funds. But most forms of human cooperation are not startups. Finally, setting up a DAO is complex and expensive.
Because of all this, DAOs can only ever serve a tiny slice of human organization—think trade bodies, peer-to-peer commerce, professional associations, churches, cooperatives, clubs, (local) governments, standards organizations, and much more. These cannot be served by the current DAO model.
By trying to force human cooperation through code alone, this industry excludes itself from at least 95% of forms of human organization that are not startups of dubious legality.
Can we make blockchain technology available for more common forms of organization? Can we liberate blockchain users from this legal complexity?
Vattelum: Merging Law and Blockchain
Vattelum offers a bridge between code and law, making new forms of cooperation possible. It introduces standards for law-making on the blockchain, which users adopt individually and voluntarily.
By not tying users up in complex financial and legal products, Vattelum makes the peer-to-peer economy possible.
Privately created standards have always governed global financial markets. The global derivatives market—over $800 trillion in notional value—is a good example.
…Vattelum brings private law-making to the blockchain…
It is based on the idea that two adults can sit down, determine what rules they want to apply to their voluntary transactions, and record binding law on the blockchain.
The Five Repositories Making Up The Vattelum Ecosystem
Repo 1: The Registry
The first app is a standard registry of law on the Ethereum blockchain. The laws are permanently stored on Arweave. Using this app and the correct citation standards, any institution or individual can start enacting laws on the blockchain.
Legally, a Registry is just one party publishing (open-source) legal standards for others to adopt—like how people contribute software through GitHub.
Repo 2: The Blockchain Voting System (BVS)
The Blockchain Voting System allows stakeholder votes on policies. An NGO uses it to formalise consultation with its donors. An aid organization uses it to ratify how funds get allocated. A local government uses it to put a zoning plan to a vote of residents.
This kind of non-financial, legal use of the blockchain opens up a whole range of use-cases.
Legally, a BVS is just one party using technology for a vote—helpful blockchain voting tools without legal complexity.
Repo 3: The Decentralized Autonomous Association (DAA)
The DAA brings decentralized law-making to the blockchain. By giving users a vote in the laws applicable to their voluntary interactions, the DAA lets any collective, new technology, or industry cooperate under predictable and enforceable law.
A DAA is specifically not an organization, and does not manage money or engage in risky or regulated activities. When participants engage commercially, they do it peer-to-peer like any normal business.
A well-structured DAA could replace intermediary platforms for cross-border activities like Upwork or Amazon.
Repo 4: The Smart Contract Block (SCB)
The Smart Contract Block pulls laws from registries and turns them into binding agreements. This is the missing piece, and formalizes the legal context for smart contracts.
The end product is a binding contract that can be printed as a PDF and taken to a court for enforcement.
It can become a framework for ecommerce, international trade, real-world transactions, licensing agreements, and much more.
Repo 5: The Vattelum Software Package
Interoperability within the ecosystem is achieved through the Vattelum package. It formalizes the standards for storing law. With it, laws can be cited, read, and implemented across the blockchain.
Available as an npm package or as a Solidity package for on-chain integration, making it straightforward to adopt in any EVM-compatible project.
What Vattelum Can’t Do
Vattelum doesn’t aim to be a nation or an organization. It makes blockchain tools available to self-regulate blockchain-based transactions.
It offers new standards, tools, and perspectives on cross-border, voluntary, blockchain-based cooperation.
Vattelum doesn’t enforce anything on its own. I discovered that on-chain enforcement of law is actually a pipe-dream, as I will explain in a future post. Enforcement routes through courts and arbitration the same way as the rest of the internet operates.
It also doesn’t govern or enforce specific smart contracts on-chain. Although such specifications can be built, they cannot be standardized.
The Vattelum Name
Vattelum is named after the Swiss legal scholar Emerich de Vattel, one of the founding fathers of the current international legal order. He was instrumental in transforming the principles of natural law—a law of sovereign equals—into a working system of international law.
In an industry suffering from the overreach of international law [see here, and here], this project aims to restore law’s once-true origins in a Vattelian sense: the harmonization of rights and duties among equals and across man-made boundaries.
Use and Contribute
Vattelum is open-source. Try the software and become a law-maker.
Fork it, deploy it, found your own DAA. Create your own legal system, and help build the blockchain industry’s next frontier: decentralized law.