Columbia Law School
Sky Blog
Questions of FinTech and RegTech have been paramount in my mind and, I think it is safe to say, the minds of my fellow Commissioners in recent months.[1]
Old Fields and New Corn
On the paneled walls of the
decentralized autonomous organizations
How to Move from Local to Global Regulation of Crypto-Assets
On July 7, 2022, the U.S. Department of Treasury (USDT) published a fact-sheet on the regulation of digital assets(a.k.a. crypto-assets) in which it emphasized the need for global cooperation. However, this fact-sheet is only a drop in an ocean …
Wachtell Lipton Discusses Legal Considerations for Decentralized Autonomous Organizations
We recently wrote about the emergence of a new breed of business organizations — decentralized autonomous organizations (DAOs) — to contend that the governance design for these blockchain-based organizations should heed some of the hard-fought lessons that have helped to …
Wachtell Lipton Discusses Emerging Issues in Decentralized Governance and the Lessons of Corporate Governance
While recent gyrations in cryptoasset markets have focused attention on the future contours of stablecoins, market-making, and impending regulation, another feature of the blockchain landscape is also confronting noteworthy challenges. Specifically, a new breed of business organization has emerged …
Blockchain-Based Corporate Governance
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 …
Blockchain Solutions for Agency Problems in Corporate Governance
As a foundational technology, blockchain creates the infrastructure for decentralized networked governance that, over time, creates the environment that enables the removal of internal and external monitoring mechanisms previously necessitated by agency problems in corporate governance. Blockchain technology facilitates a …
What Public Blockchain Protocol Governance Can Learn from Corporate Governance
Despite the hype, blockchain technology remains in an early phase of development. Indeed, for many public blockchain protocols, the process of building consensus around the desired trajectory of the code base remains under-conceptualized and informal. Such uncertainty has led to …
Initial Crypto-asset Offerings, Tokenization, and Corporate Governance
Blockchain and other types of distributed ledger technology pose various new legal and economic questions for companies. Are crypto-asset holders a new kind of corporate stakeholder? If so, are they like shareholders or bondholders, and how can they participate in …
