Less than a decade after the Financial Crisis, we are witnessing the fast emergence of a new financial order driven by three different, yet interconnected, dynamics: first, the rapid application of technology - such as big data, machine learning, and distributed computing - to banking, lending, and investing, in particular with the emergence of virtual currencies and digital finance; second, a disintermediation fuelled by the rise of peer-to-peer lending platforms and crowd investment which challenge the traditional banking model and may, over time, lead to a transformation of the way both retail and corporate customers bank; and, third, a tendency of de-bureaucratisation under which new platforms and technologies challenge established organisational patterns that regulate finance and manage the money supply.
These changes are to a significant degree driven by the development of blockchain technology. The aim of this book is to understand the technological and business potential of the blockchain technology and to reflect on its legal challenges. The book mainly focuses on the challenges blockchain technology has so far faced in its first application in the areas of virtual money and finance, as well as those that it will inevitably face (and is partially already facing, as the SEC Investigative Report of June 2017 and an ongoing SEC securities fraud investigation show) as its domain of application expands in other fields of economic activity such as smart contracts and initial coin offerings. The book provides an unparalleled critical analysis of the disruptive potential of this technology for the economy and the legal system and contributes to current thinking on the role of law in harvesting and shaping innovation.
Philipp Hacker, LL.M. (Yale), is a postdoctoral fellow at the law department of Humboldt University of Berlin, an A.SK Fellow at WZB Berlin Social Sciences Center and a Research Fellow at the Centre for Blockchain Technologies and at the Centre for Law, Economics and Society, both at UCL.
Ioannis Lianos holds the chair of global competition law and policy at UCL Laws. He is also Director of the Centre for Law, Economics and Society and Executive Director of the Jevons Institute of Competition Law and Economics. He was awarded a Gutenberg Research chair at the Ecole Nationale d'Administration (ENA), the elite public administration school of the French republic in November 2011 and was appointed in 2015 chief researcher at the Skolkovo Institute for Law and Development, the leading innovation law centre at the Russian Federation. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Chile in Santiago, the Centre for Industrial Property Studies (CEIPI) at the University of Strasbourg and has been an Alexander von Humboldt fellow at the WZB and Humboldt University, Berlin, as well as an Emile Noel fellow at NYU Law School and a visiting fellow at the University of California, Berkeley.
Georgios Dimitropoulos is an Assistant Professor of Law at HBKU College of Law & Public Policy. Georgios studied Law at the University of Athens, and holds an LLM from Yale Law School, and a PhD summa cum laude from the University of Heidelberg.
Stefan Eich is the Perkins-Cotsen Postdoctoral Fellow in the Princeton Society of Fellows and a Lecturer in Politics at Princeton University. Stefan's research interests are in political theory and the history of political thought.
