All contracts are necessarily incomplete. The inefficiencies of bargaining over every contingency, coupled with humans' innate bounded rationality, mean that contracts cannot anticipate and address every potential eventuality. One role of law is to fill gaps in incomplete contracts with default...

Information asymmetries in financial markets are not a new phenomenon. In a recent poll conducted amongst 76 industry experts, a staggering 83% of participants stated they do not believe utility token issuers disclose enough information to their stakeholders. This essay provides actionable...

Due to technological change and the rise of private digital currencies more and more central banks investigate the possibility of issuing their own Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). This paper develops a conceptual framework, which shows how the issuance of CBDC and the provision of access...

Blockchain technology is a new general-purpose technology that poses significant challenges to the existing state of law, economy and society. Blockchain has one feature that makes it even more distinctive than other disruptive technologies: it is, by nature and design, global and transnational....

Bitcoin is the oldest and most widely established cryptocurrency network with the highest market capitalization among all cryptocurrencies. Although bitcoin (with lowercase b) is increasingly viewed as a digital asset belonging to a new asset class, the Bitcoin network (with uppercase B) is a...

Cryptocurrencies have entered the economy as alternative money, as speculation objects, and as utility tokens for innovative service-platforms. Predictions are numerous. While some predict that their value will skyrocket, others predict their collapse. Some predict them to completely transform...

In the overheated atmosphere surrounding blockchain technologies, predictions of what “might be” are difficult to distinguish from actual commercial applications. It is also difficult to discern the relevant characteristics of blockchains, those that require legal or regulatory attention....

On December 1, 2017, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Inc. and the CBOE Futures Exchange self-certified new contracts for cash-settled bitcoin futures products. The self-certification process allows designated contract markets to list new derivative products one day after submitting in writing to...

The recent decade has witnessed an extraordinary degree of innovation in the financial sector. Developments in financial technology, computing power, and networking theory have allowed decentralized online platforms such as Bitcoin to fundamentally change the way that financial services are...