As we venture into 2024, you cannot go a day without hearing about cryptocurrency, tokens, or blockchain. These subjects were either treated as a revolution or seen as a disruption by the public. In this paper, and several others to come, we will adopt a modernized approach to the entirety of blockchain technology, one that asserts blockchain as a revolution. This is not just any revolution, but one that is underway on every continent on the planet. Blockchain is a proud concept that isn’t controlled by bureaucrats in back offices of governments but establishes a new era of financial and legal inclusion.

The loss of trust in the centralized financial system after the economic and social crisis of 2008 gave Satoshi Nakamoto the opportunity to enter the scene. Who he is, no one has been able to say for sure, but we comprehend him as an unknown iconoclastic genius. In October of 2008, he published the renowned whitepaper entitled ‘Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System’, in other words, the foundational elements of Blockchain.

At its core, blockchain technology enables a decentralized network of computers (or nodes) to agree on the validity of transactions without the need for a central authority. This is achieved through a consensus mechanism, which varies among different blockchain implementations but serves the same purpose: ensuring all transactions are accurately recorded and immutable once added to the blockchain.

This peer-to-peer (P2P) architecture not only increases the resilience of the system against attacks or failures but also significantly reduces the reliance on traditional financial intermediaries, such as banks and clearinghouses. As a result, blockchain facilitates faster, more secure, and less expensive transactions that can occur directly between parties anywhere in the world. Beyond financial transactions, this technology is being applied to a wide range of applications, including supply chain management, digital identity verification, and secure voting systems, demonstrating its versatility and potential to transform various industries by enabling trust, transparency, and efficiency in a way previously not possible.

And the main question that is stepping forward is regarding the lack of regulation around it. In fact, regulators are grappling with how to manage this radical movement. Countries across the globe are adopting different approaches toward the regulation of this upcoming technology, some of them with friendlier regimes and some with innovation-destroying regulation. As far as the EU is concerned, all we can say is that it is too soon; yes, there was a proposal. A proposal from the EU parliament proposing new blockchain regulation aiming towards the launching of the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum to accelerate experimentation.

Regulation is vague, and to be fair, a system as complex as this one is generally vague, but that does not mean it is not innovative or groundbreaking enough to praise and follow. The nature of human beings is to fear the upcoming, the new, the reverse of what we are used to; however, blockchain is the future, a future that is taking over the market and especially the crypto world. It has been almost 16 years since its rise, and blockchain is both more and less of what was supposed to be. Sometimes as a meaningful business opportunity and sometimes as a very manipulative Ponzi Scheme, and what is more needed in this situation is a legal team that offers ample helpings of both. We are here to guide you towards this technology, the technology that regulators are many steps behind in understanding. Guidance is a gift, however, partnership toward success is a blessing.

Writer : Styliana Aristeidou