Deep Work Notes

Disclaimer: NOT LEGAL ADVICE: It is not intended to provide legal advice or opinions of any kind and may not be used for professional or commercial purposes.

The following is a series of notes in my own personal research on DAO legal entities and structures. Most resources are third-parties and not associated with Deep Work. Please note, Deep Work’s structure at best is ‘duck tape’ and is not advisable in anyway what so ever. We’ve put it together to provide some kind of legal entity and limited liability for our team whilst working with clients. Most importantly to note, the ownership is far from decentralised and we use it as a working model. Keeping costs lean is more important than a perfect set up for the stage we’re at.

How Deep Work is structured

https://docs.deepwork.studio/master/background-and-introduction/infrastructure/financial-and-org.-structure

Summary: Deep Work is a British Virgin Islands Limited Company. It has two owners who have 50% of the shares. It’s used to invoice clients and set up a legal agreement with clients. Giving the team limited liability. Deep Work’s token acts as an internal spreadsheet and we may (with no promise what-so-ever) use it to determine a better legal and ownership set up in the future.

Why British Virgin Islands

• Fast and low cost set up (~$1,200 using a third party and ongoing fees of $1,000 a year)
• Limited reporting requirements means we have a lean set up rather than monthly reporting.

How to set one up

We used https://bbcincorp.com/offshore - I recommend their services.

Notes on offshore and tax

I’m personally against tax havens and offshore legal setups. There’s a strong part of me that by even using one, we set an example that these legal structures are ok on moral grounds. On balance, the intention is to run a lean business and the structure means:

• There is no corporation tax which avoids a double taxation for our users. For example, everyone who gets paid by Deep Work in anyway provides an invoice or agrees to declare their income and pay taxes in their personal tax residence. This means everyone pays tax once on their income, rather than after twice on corp. tax then on income. This was more difficult with a global distributed team each with unique tax set ups.
• We make sure users are aware of the set up and that they agree to report their taxes. We also have a system similar to KYC where users submit their address and tax residence.