MOATcoin: Exploring Challenges and Legal Implications of Smart Contracts Through a Gamelike DApp Experiment

In this paper we present MOATcoin, a gamelike experiment that enabled us to practically investigate the open issues related to the governance and legal facets of smart contract based decentralized applications. After presenting the MOATcoin system architecture,we first tackle the problems of decentralized governance, its limits and the shift of trust that it entails; then, we explore the possible legal implications of the given scenario and, particularly, the con-sequences of code-written contracts. Finally, we offer taxonomical remarks on the concepts of “token” and “coin” and offer an insight from a regulatory perspective