Blockchain Legal Resource

On October 18, 2022, the European Commission published a report, titled Information Frictions and Public Policies: Approaching the Regulation and Supervision of Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) (the “Report”). The Report discusses the need to adapt existing policy frameworks to account for the change brought about by DeFi to the underlying information structure upon which financial services are provided. Unlike traditional finance, DeFi applications provide financial services based on blockchain technology, i.e., without requiring any intermediary agent and instead relying on automated protocols that are encoded in public digital contracts universally accessible and maintained by an open pool of pseudonymous miners.

As recently reported on the Hunton Privacy & Information Security Law Blog, the European Commission released a suite of documents including its White Paper on Artificial Intelligence and two communications—its European strategy for data and a Digital Strategy document.

The materials note that decentralized digital technologies such as blockchain offer a further possibility for both individuals and companies to manage data flows and usage, based on individual free choice and self-determination. Such technologies will make dynamic data portability in real time possible ...