Your legal entity
What the Cayman SPC is, what it holds, and what the B-1 filing means.
A treasury protected by code is only half of a company. The other half is a real that can sign contracts, own intellectual property, hold a bank relationship, and be held accountable in a court. Backable can create one for you inside the wizard, in about five minutes.
What gets created
Three names get used for this, and they are three different things. Everywhere else on Backable we say your Cayman company, which means the second one:
- The Cayman SPC — one segregated portfolio company, shared by every project on Backable. It already exists. Nothing is created here.
- Your segregated portfolio — a compartment opened inside that SPC, holding only your project. This is the part that is created for you, and the part that owns your work. Cayman law ring-fences it: one portfolio's liabilities cannot reach another portfolio's assets, so a project that fails next to yours cannot touch it.
- MetaLeX — the firm that forms and files the portfolio. A provider, not the entity, and not your lawyer.
Cayman is the standard jurisdiction for this because it recognises the structure, does not add a second layer of entity-level tax on top of what members already owe, and has decades of case law around segregated portfolios. It is not an exotic choice; it is the boring one.
What the entity holds
- The project's intellectual property — code, brand, designs, whatever you assign to it.
- The domain and the accounts that run the project.
- Contracts with suppliers, contractors, and customers.
- The relationship to the DAO, which is what makes the treasury and the entity one company rather than two unrelated things.
Who controls it
The entity answers to the DAO. Founders operate it day to day within the , but decisions that dispose of what it holds — selling the brand, licensing the IP, winding it up — require a decided by a . That is the mechanism that stops a founder from raising into a DAO and then quietly moving the valuable parts into a company they own personally.
Assigning your IP
The wizard asks you to declare what intellectual property exists and to confirm, clause by clause, what is being assigned to the entity. This is the part founders are most tempted to skim, and the part backers should read first. A project whose code still sits in a founder's personal account has a treasury protected by code and an asset protected by nothing.
Your role as Operator
Signing the pack makes you the Operator of your portfolio under a Services Agreement. Three things that agreement says plainly, and that the wizard cannot soften:
- You are an at-will independent contractor of the portfolio, not an employee. Either side can end the relationship.
- You agree to run the project through the portfolio and to submit the decisions the Operating Agreement requires to decision markets.
- MetaLeX is not your law firm. Nothing in the formation flow creates an attorney–client relationship or constitutes legal advice.
Download the full pack before you sign — Services Agreement, IP Assignment, MetaLeX Terms, and the SPC governance agreements: MetaDAO founder legal pack (PDF). The Operator Services Agreement in the pack has been effective since January 2026, and this PDF is the same pack every founder signs onchain — no private side versions.
The transparency filing
Separate from the entity, the is Blockworks' Token Transparency template, which Backable has adopted. It covers prior token sales, market-maker arrangements, insider allocations, and known risks. It is voluntary. Because it is voluntary, its presence tells a reader more than its contents usually do.
What it costs and what it doesn't do
Formation happens inside the create flow and costs you nothing — Backable and MetaDAO cover MetaLeX setup, and the only Backable fee anywhere is the $15 saved-draft charge. What the entity does not do: it does not make you compliant with securities law in your own country, it does not replace tax advice, and it does not turn a project into a business. It gives the project a legal body that outlives any individual founder, which is the prerequisite for everything else.