Ether Review Legal #6 — Playing in a Sandbox

In today’s long overdue, landmark episode we are joined by an international panel of leaders in fin-tech and blockchain law:

Claire Wivell, Hannah Glass (Australia), Alex Simms (New Zealand), Peter van Valkenburgh (USA), and James Duchenne (USA/Mauritius)

The theme for the discussion was regulatory sandboxes — frameworks for enabling businesses to operate in a deregulated environment. The goal is to allow legislative bodies to develop an understanding of new businesses before regulating them. We have seen a successful example in the United Kingdom, but Australia’s efforts to replicate this have not been so successful. Claire Wivell explains why.

We follow this with a discussion of the unique environments of Australia, Mauritius, Singapore and Dubai. New Zealand unfortunately is not so interesting at this stage (both Alex Simms and myself have independently been involved in some interesting conversations since this episode was recorded so watch this space).

We conclude that a US regulatory sandbox is impossible due to the interaction of federal and state legislation and the complexity of their enforcement agencies. However, there is hope if a bright line can be defined between the regulation of custodial and non-custodial businesses

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https://itunes.apple.com//podcast/the-ether-review/id899090462?mt=2