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The drivers of the crypto community have echoed around the world like the anthem of a Promised Land. They strive for decentralisation, disintermediation, democratisation; they pledge openness, security, transparency. The current state of the crypto space, however, still reminds us of the tangle that was characteristic for the Wild West’s heydays — an analogy that lately has often been drawn with regard to partial lawlessness, craze, and fragmentation.

After crypto-anarchism provided the underlying mechanisms of blockchain technology, only a well-designed crypto-corporatism can now catalyse them further. While the expanding spectrum of crypto ideas sprouting around the world points towards structural societal transformations, an alignment is due: Innovation requires coordination; maturation requires legalisation. As active participants in the crypto community, we have developed a sense of urgency regarding these demands. We see that our evolving space needs solid foundations to foster certainty as to what the future of blockchain holds.

Formation of Blockchain Policy Initiative

On these grounds, we have now established the Blockchain Policy Initiative. While our engagements with distributed ledger technologies are diverse, this venture shall serve as a platform to discover and promote the concerns we share. Lawyers often lack a technological understanding of blockchain developments while at the same time entrepreneurs are in need of a thorough legal understanding. Our overarching goal of Blockchain Policy Initiative is to be the platform for these two arenas to coordinate.

As we witness a jurisdictional competition around blockchain regulation emerging on a global scale, we are inevitably moving closer to the taming of the Wild West feasts. Our initiative shall make sure that we can play an active and creative role in this process — as a community-driven, decentral and open interest group of shapers and makers eager to advance the policy foundations for the cryptoeconomy. We promote information symmetry, expectability and transparency, but we opt to avoid the application of excessive formalities. We are at home in Europe, but we identify as a transnational platform that shall foster the societal and juridical acceptance of blockchain technology around the world.

Blockchain Policy Initiative Report

We find it most crucial that the states of law and technology go hand in hand. Prompt and apt regulation is key for planning security and sure-handed conduct of technological applications. Only if modern overhauls of respective legal frameworks touch upon the novel features of blockchain technology can they do justice to the present era of the Internet.

In this spirit, our community has developed the Blockchain Policy Initiative Report as a continuously refined groundwork to help eliminate the regulatory uncertainty around distributed ledger technology. In its now over 100 pages of expert analysis, we discuss the dynamics of the respective core technologies and their effects on economic processes. We explore how cryptocurrencies and cryptotokens match with existing regulations and recommend that they be treated as a separate asset class — without automatically triggering securities law or VAT regulation. Thereby, we propose a legislative approach that shall serve the interests of businesses, investors and civil society alike. In this spirit, we call upon legislators to effectively collaborate with crypto experts in the establishment of a simple, yet robust regulatory framework.

Check out our Report here.

The report’s first draft stemmed from a cooperation between law firms Lacore and Wardynski & Partners and blockchain startup Neufund, which builds a community-owned fundraising platform. After this first impulse, the report was handed over to the crypto community as an open source document. It has since been further developed by hundreds of blockchain experts from all around the world and grown so extensively that some coordination of this interest has become crucial — is now one of our initiative’s duties to oversee the further development of this legal toolkit. As it is being developed further, we will remain to stay in close contact with policy makers of many jurisdictions.

Ten Calls for the Governance of our Cryptoeconomy

Blockchain Policy Initiative unites industry experts to carve out the core principles that guide our mission to promote clear guidance, innovation and opportunity for the cryptoeconomy. We acknowledge that while our participants’ engagements with blockchain are utterly diverse, there are certain core concerns that we all share.

The Manifesto will be elaborated during the first Blockchain Policy Workshop. It will take place in Berlin at the end of September 2017. We will go through a structured and transparent process both online and offline to carve out the most pressing principles, values and concerns with regards to the legal framing of blockchain technology. The resulting ‘Ten Calls for the Governance of our Cryptoeconomy’ shall manifest the most concise public declaration of the community’s purpose and intent thus far. If you are interested in contributing to the Manifesto, please get in touch.

Aligning a Strong Crypto Community

Blockchain Policy Initiative brings together an inclusive and decentralised community of blockchain experts — startups, VCs, law firms, and other initiatives, all working in and on the cryptoeconomy. We have already assembled some key players of the industry for our platform, which enables the exchange of ideas at the intersection of distributed ledger technologies and legal frameworks.

If you are a blockchain expert who cares about the advancement of our ecosystem, we welcome you to join us in shaping a future-proof environment or the crypto community so that blockchain technology can unfold its potential to the fullest. There are different levels of engagement: Your organisation may become a signatory to make our voice even stronger. You may contribute to our community’s publications by adding your expertise to the open source documents. You may set up further meet-ups in our name. Naturally, the more we grow, the stronger become our knowledge pool, message, and outreach.

Safeguarding the Future of the Cryptoeconomy

It is ever more understood that blockchain technology it is not just a mere outgrowth of Information and Communication Technologies, but rather a fundamentally novel social or institutional technology for coordinating actors.

As its disciplinary enforcement mechanisms foster crypto-economic trust, as now ‘code is law’, further technological progress will demand novel approaches in governance and regulation: How can we integrate smart contracts into existing legal frameworks? How do they apply to trans-jurisdictional transactions? How do we define responsibilities when distributed ledger technologies interoperate with IoT and AI technologies?

With regards to existing challenges and future unknown unknowns alike, the community around Blockchain Policy Initiative will do its best so that the promises of our crypto space remain a chorus worth chanting.

If you would like to learn more about our efforts, please go to blockchainpolicy.org and contact us at join@blockchainpolicy.org.