Decrypting the Signs of Regulatory Competition in Regulating Cryptoassets

Abstract

Abstract The icos market has challenged financial regulators in terms of determining fit with existing regimes and consideration for regulatory reform. Regulatory divergences have emerged in a number of jurisdictions and we discuss three dominant approaches in relation to hegemonic, self-regulatory and enabling regimes. These reflect different assumptions and regulators’ understandings of the cryptoasset industry, and we argue that the ‘terms for competition’ in relation to supply and demand side needs are still being discovered and are incomplete. This provides a unique opportunity for regulators to jettison familiar assumptions in relation to corporatized securities issuers or institutional investors in order to discover what governance needs are truly at stake. This may pose challenges for coherence with existing regulation but coherence should not itself be an obstacle for learning and potentially, reform. We also argue that signs of international regulatory coordination in relation to the Libra project are not necessarily reflective of a wider trend for the cryptoasset industry. This is because regulators can apply existing and familiar financial regulation paradigms more easily to the Libra Association, in particular its leading founding member Facebook. The cryptoasset market is still likely to give rise to diversity and should facilitate the discovery of new bases for regulatory thinking and policy, uncoordinated or otherwise.