Bank for International Settlements Proposes “Embedded Regulation” for Blockchain Markets

The Bank for International Settlements (BIS), an international financial institution owned by the world’s central banks, has published a working paper, called Embedded Supervision: How To Build Regulation Into Blockchain Finance, which supports the idea of constructing blockchain-based regulation into markets, by making the case for a regulatory framework that can open up new ways of supervising financial risks and provides compliance in tokenised markets to be automatically monitored by reading the market’s ledger, thus reducing the need for firms to actively collect, verify and deliver data. 

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A decentralised market is modelled that replaces today’s intermediary-based verification of legal data with blockchain-enabled data credibility based on economic consensus.

The key results set out the conditions under which the market’s economic consensus would be strong enough to guarantee that transactions are economically final so that supervisors can trust the distributed ledger’s data. The paper concludes with a discussion of the legislative and operational requirements that would promote low-cost supervision and a level playing field for small and large firms.

The paper’s author, Raphael Auer, Principal Economist at the BIS, calls it “embedded supervision”.

The paper sketches out the basic design for embedded supervision. It then models a distributed ledger-based financial market and shows under what conditions supervisors can trust the data from a distributed ledger.

DLT makes possible the decentralised trading of asset-backed tokens, as well as decentralised financial engineering based on these tokens via self-executing contracts.

As data credibility in such markets is assured by economic incentives, supervisors need to ensure that the market’s economic consensus is strong enough to guarantee the finality of transactions and resultant ownership positions. Only in this case can supervisors trust the quality of the data in the distributed ledger.

To this end, the paper outlines a distributed and permissioned market in which “blocks” of financial contracts are verified by third parties. These verifiers stand to lose a set amount of verification capital should the blockchain ever be reversed, thus voiding existing transactions.

…The paper’s main theoretical result is to show how much capital verifiers would have to stake so that no market participant would ever find it profitable to bribe them into reversing the transaction history. As transactions would then be economically final, supervisors could then trust the distributed ledger’s data.

The full paper is available here.

Regulating cryptocurrencies: assessing market reactions, Auer on Cryptocurrencies in 2018

Hat tip to  Simon Zenios & Co LLC  for the lead on the article. 

About Richard Kastelein

Founder and publisher of industry publication Blockchain News (EST 2015), a partner at ICO services collective Token.Agency ($750m+ and 90+ ICOs and STOs), director of education company Blockchain Partners (Oracle Partner) – Vancouver native Richard Kastelein is an award-winning publisher, innovation executive and entrepreneur. He sits on the advisory boards of some two dozen Blockchain startups and has written over 1500 articles on Blockchain technology and startups at Blockchain News and has also published pioneering articles on ICOs in Harvard Business Review and Venturebeat. Irish Tech News put him in the top 10 Token Architects in Europe.

Kastelein has an Ad Honorem – Honorary Ph.D. and is Chair Professor of Blockchain at China’s first Blockchain University in Nanchang at the Jiangxi Ahead Institute of Software and Technology. In 2018 he was invited to and attended University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School for Business Automation 4.0 programme.  Over a half a decade experience judging and rewarding some 1000+ innovation projects as an EU expert for the European Commission’s SME Instrument programme as a startup assessor and as a startup judge for the UK government’s Innovate UK division.

Kastelein has spoken (keynotes & panels) on Blockchain technology in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Barcelona, Beijing, Brussels, Bucharest, Dubai, Eindhoven, Gdansk, Groningen, the Hague, Helsinki, London (5x), Manchester, Minsk, Nairobi, Nanchang, Prague, San Mateo, San Francisco, Santa Clara (2x), Shanghai, Singapore (3x), Tel Aviv, Utrecht, Venice, Visakhapatnam, Zwolle and Zurich.

He is a Canadian (Dutch/Irish/English/Métis) whose writing career has ranged from the Canadian Native Press (Arctic) to the Caribbean & Europe. He’s written occasionally for Harvard Business Review, Wired, Venturebeat, The Guardian and Virgin.com, and his work and ideas have been translated into Dutch, Greek, Polish, German and French. A journalist by trade, an entrepreneur and adventurer at heart, Kastelein’s professional career has ranged from political publishing to TV technology, boatbuilding to judging startups, skippering yachts to marketing and more as he’s travelled for nearly 30 years as a Canadian expatriate living around the world. In his 20s, he sailed around the world on small yachts and wrote a series of travel articles called, ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Seas’ travelling by hitching rides on yachts (1989) in major travel and yachting publications. He currently lives in Groningen, Netherlands where he’s raising three teenage daughters with his wife and sailing partner, Wieke Beenen.

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