Over the years, a wide variety of nontraditional investments from orange groves to earthworms and scotch whiskey have been held to be securities. The securities laws' definition is expansive because of its inclusion of “investment contract” in the statutory definition and the courts'...

True cryptocurrency believers posit a world with virtually limitless applications for the block chain. They tout the prospect of a globally accepted currency that works with lightning speed, costs virtually nothing, and guarantees 100% security and anonymity while eliminating the need to trust...

This paper investigates the alignment of existing securities regulations with the emerging landscape of crypto-tokens and blockchain technology. By examining the features of these digital assets, including decentralization, consensus mechanisms, and programmability, we analyze how they interact...

Crypto Funds (CFs) represent a novel investor type in entrepreneurial finance. CFs intermediate Decentralized Finance (DeFi) markets by pooling contributions from crowd-investors and investing in tokenized startups, combining sophisticated venture- and hedge-style investment strategies. We...

In 2008, an anonymous person calling himself Satoshi Nakamoto created Bitcoin. The basic idea for the creation of Bitcoin came after the 2008 global financial crisis caused by bad housing loans in the United States. Since then, Satoshi Nakamoto has designed a decentralized financial system that...

Various states have started providing private law frameworks for blockchain transfersand crypto assets. The first acts have been adopted by France and Liechtenstein,while a commission of the British government sees no difficulties in extending propertyprotection under the Common law to crypto...

More and more established companies are getting involved in the cryptomarket and/or considering cryptocurrencies as an alternative to cash. In addition, recently, El Salvador became the first country to declare Bitcoin as a legal tender. Against this background, this paper examines how holdings...

Bitcoin plunged by 30% on May 19, 2021. We examine the outage the largest crypto exchange Binance experienced during the crash, when it halted trading for retail clients and stopped providing transaction data. We find evidence that Binance back-filled these missing transactions with data that...

Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Ether encourage the owners of computing resources to bring ever-increasing levels of processing power to bear in validating the distributed ledger of cryptocurrency purchases and sales. Initial coin offerings (ICOs) involve the sale or other distribution of...