Regulating Blockchain

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.

• Philipp Hacker, Ioannis Lianos, Georgios Dimitropoulos and Stefan Eich: Regulating Blockchain: Techno-Social and Legal Challenges - An Introduction Part I: Technological and Business Challenges of Blockchain Technology 1: Paolo Tasca and Riccardo Piselli: The Blockchain Paradox 2: Aaron Wright and Jonathan Rohr: Blockchains, Private Ordering and The Future of Governance 3: Angela Walch: In Code(rs) We Trust: Software Developers as Fiduciaries in Public Blockchains Part II: Blockchain and the Future of Money 4: Stefan Eich: Old Utopias, New Tax Havens: The Politics of Bitcoin in Historical Perspective 5: Claus D. Zimmermann: Monetary Policy in the Digital Age 6: Georgios Dimitropoulos: Global Currencies and Domestic Regulation: Embedding through Enabling? 7: Philipp Hacker: Corporate Governance for Complex Cryptocurrencies? A Framework for Stability and Decision Making in Blockchain-Based Organizations Part III: Blockchain and the Future of Banking, Finance, Insurance and Securities Regulation 8: Rohan Grey: Banking in a Digital Fiat Currency Regime 9: Jonathan Greenacre: Regulating the Shadow Payment System: Bitcoin, Mobile Money and Beyond 10: Michael Abramowicz: Blockchain-Based Insurance 11: Alexandros Seretakis: Blockchain, Securities Markets and Central Banking 12: Philipp Hacker and Chris Thomale: The Crypto-Security: Initial Coin Offerings and EU Securities Regulation 13: Houman Shadab: Regulation of Blockchain Token Sales in the United States Part IV: Beyond Finance: Blockchain as a legal and regulatory challenge 14: Agnieszka Janczuk-Gorywoda: Blockchain and Payment Systems: A Tale about Re-Intermediation 15: Florian Möslein: Conflicts of Laws and Codes: Defining the Boundaries of Digital Jurisdictions 16: Pietro Ortolani: The Judicialisation of Blockchain 17: Roger Brownsword: Smart Contracts: Coding the Transaction, Decoding the Legal Debates Part V: Connecting the Dots: Competitive Advantage and Regulation in the Era of Blockchain 18: Ioannis Lianos: Blockchain Competition. Gaining Competitive Advantage in the Digital Economy: Competition Law Implications

The book provides an excellent survey of the legal implications of blockchain, and of the legal challenges FinTech entrepreneurs are facing when they want to develop blockchain applications. It shows that blockchain clearly is not the answer to everything, but that it can make a difference in many aspects of FinTech and beyond.