O’Melveny & Myers Discusses the Legal Challenges of NFTs

By Heather J. Meeker, Laurel Loomis Rimon, Eric Sibbitt and Braddock Stevenson April 14, 2021 by Nisha Chandra

Non-Fungible Tokens, or NFTs, are big news these days. After an NFT for a piece of digital art by the artist Beeple (Mike Winkelmann) sold for $69 million in March 2021―making it the third-most expensive artwork by a living …

How Blockchain-Based Financial Markets Can Create Systemic Risks That Harm Lower-Income People

By Heather Hughes March 29, 2021 by renholding

Blockchain-based platforms create exciting possibilities for financial inclusion: widespread ownership of deposit accounts and access to payments services. From a macro-level perspective, however, these platforms can aggravate systemic risks. Systemic instability, in turn, threatens financial inclusion and sustainability.

Sustainable finance, …

Latham & Watkins Discusses Whether NFTs Are Securities

By Stephen P. Wink, Miles P. Jennings, Shaun Musuka and Deric Behar March 19, 2021 by Nisha Chandra

As the current crypto boom has progressed, it seemed Decentralized Finance (DeFi) had cemented its position as the dominant new narrative of this cycle. This view is supported by the tens of billions of dollars that have flowed into DeFi …

Goodwin Procter Discusses SEC Statement on Custody of Digital Asset Securities

By Nicholas J. Losurdo, Peter W. LaVigne and Jana Steenholdt January 13, 2021 by Nisha Chandra

Christmas came early for many in the digital asset community by way of a statement from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC” or “Commission”) on December 23, 2020 that grants relief in the area of broker “custody” of digital …

Crypto-Enforcement Around the World

By Douglas S. Eakeley and Yuliya Guseva November 24, 2020 by renholding

The market for cryptoassets is burgeoning, as distributed ledger technology transforms capital and financial markets. With the extraordinary growth in the crypto-markets comes the need for regulation to promote efficiency, capital formation, and innovation while protecting investors. With the need …

What Blockchain and Artificial Intelligence Won’t Do for Corporate Lawyers

By Jeffrey M. Lipshaw September 15, 2020 by renholding

There have been a number of scholarly paeans to blockchain as a corporate governance tool. It creates a permanent and irreversible chain of custody that can be used for shareholder record keeping and voting, insider trading, corporate disclosures, and trade …

Why the Proposed Blockchain Token Safe Harbor Makes Sense

By Lee A. Schneider April 24, 2020 by renholding

The application of the U.S. securities laws to blockchain tokens has been a controversial subject, with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) taking an aggressive posture. On February 6, 2020, SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce proposed a non-exclusive safe harbor from …

How Nudges Can Help Regulate New Technologies

By Nissim Cohen and Hadar Y. Jabotinsky April 17, 2020 by renholding

New technologies are being introduced in markets around the globe. Disruptive innovations such as blockchain, cryptocurrencies, the Internet of things, automated cars and other products that support decision-making based on artificial intelligence (AI) are offering a creative take on traditional …

Will FinTech Disruption in the ‘20s Be Roaring?

By Troy A. Paredes and Lee A. Schneider April 3, 2020 by renholding

In recent podcasts, we addressed three themes, among other topics: how artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) can change how decisions get made; how blockchain can transform how we transact and how we record and communicate things; and how technology …

SEC Commissioner Peirce Offers Proposal to Fill Gap Between Regulation and Decentralization

By Hester M. Peirce February 11, 2020 by renholding

I appreciate the opportunity to be with all of you today. Before beginning, I have to remind you that the views I express are my own and do not necessarily represent those of the Securities and Exchange Commission or my

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Blockchain in Corporate Governance: Implications for Attorneys

By Adam Sulkowski and Joan MacLeod Heminway December 16, 2019 by renholding

Blockchain-based information storage, retrieval, and tracking have the potential to be more immediate, transparent, and credible means of business recordkeeping than alternatives involving a centralized point of control.[1] As a result it should be unsurprising that corporations have begun …

Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance

By Wulf Kaal September 6, 2019 by renholding

Corporate governance is characterized by agency constructs. The agency relationship in modern finance and corporate governance is characterized by attempts to optimize incentives between principals and agents, control costs, minimize information asymmetries, control adverse selection and moral hazard, optimize risk …

Fintech and Banking

By Anjan V. Thakor August 14, 2019 by renholding

In a recent paper, I review the literature on fintech and its interaction with banking. Included in fintech are innovations in payment systems (including cryptocurrencies), credit markets (including peer-to-peer or “P2P” lending), and insurance, with blockchain-assisted smart contracts playing a …

Riding the Mania of Blockchain: Public Firms’ Speculative 8-K Disclosures

By Stephanie F. Cheng, Gus De Franco, Haibo Jiang and Pengkai Lin August 7, 2019 by renholding

The price of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency based on blockchain technology, increased dramatically from less than a penny when it was launched in 2009 to $900 in January 2017 and peaked at over $19,500 in December 2017. This rise coincided with …

SEC Commissioner Discusses Cross-Border Cooperation in Digital-Asset Regulation

By Hester M. Peirce August 6, 2019 by renholding

Thank you, Robby [Greene], for that kind intro. I am delighted to see that Robby, once my research assistant, has clearly gone on to bigger and better things. I also am delighted to be here in Singapore, by some accounts

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ICO vs. IPO: Empirical Findings, Information Asymmetry, and the Appropriate Regulatory Framework

By Moran Ofir and Ido Sadeh August 5, 2019 by renholding

Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are a new form of fundraising whereby blockchain-related ventures raise public capital in exchange for newly issued digital tokens. The issued tokens may represent a variety of rights, ranging from financial rights – such as dividend …

Blockchain Will Not Solve the Proxy Voting Problem

By Park Bramhall July 31, 2019 by renholding

The U.S. proxy voting process is widely viewed as inefficient, opaque, and frequently inaccurate. The conventional wisdom is that voting inaccuracy has arisen largely as a result of decisions made in the 1960s to transition to a system of share …

Libra: The Regulatory Challenges Facebook Ignored

By Georges Ugeux July 11, 2019 by renholding

The announcement on June 18 by Facebook of what it calls “a simple global currency and financial infrastructure that empowers billions of people” was sure to receive immediate attention. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is now on a global …

Can Blockchain Create a Corporate-Governance Revolution at Public Companies?

By Federico Panisi, Ross P. Buckley and Douglas W. Arner July 1, 2019 by renholding

In a new paper, we analyze the major disconnect between the theory of corporate governance, its legal expression, and the reality of corporate ownership structures, based on an “indirect holding system” (IHS), which has evolved from complex existing technological …

Blockchain Developers and Fiduciary Duty: An Ill-Fitting Framework

By Raina S. Haque, Rodrigo Seira Silva-Herzog, Brent A. Plummer and Nelson M. Rosario June 21, 2019 by renholding

By enabling new modes of human interaction, technological advancements catalyze the evolution of regulatory frameworks, tools, and approaches. The rate at which computer technology evolves outpaces that of legislation and rule-making. Our economy is increasingly structured not only by traditional …

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The CLS Blue Sky Blog

Columbia Law School's Blog on Corporations and the Capital Markets

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