Legal Status of Decentralized Finance: Towards the Articulation of Issue

Abstract

The paper discusses the issues of legal regulation of decentralized financial services (DeFi). The purpose of the work is to form a systematic understanding of the direction and scope in which they can be regulated based on the DeFi technological features and the nature of the relationships that arise between digital platforms and their users. The methodological basis of the study is determined by the range of tasks and is focused on the analysis of decentralized finance simultaneously in technological, socio-cultural, political and legal aspects. Structural functional, taxonomic, constructive, situational, innovative, targeted and program-targeted methods form the complexity of the study. Taken together, they allowed us to study DeFi in their systemic unity and formulate the following conclusion. Decentralized finance is an independent model of finance organization both in terms of a set of technical characteristics (the use of distributed registry technology, smart contract protocols, oracles, etc.) and in terms of the nature of relations between the parties (horizontal P2P communications). The identified features allow us to consider them as a separate object of legal regulation. At the same time, it is important to take into account that the matrix of DeFi regulation at the national and international levels should be built in accordance with their taxonomy and assume simultaneous balanced consideration of technological features and product affiliation of services. The legal regulation of decentralized finance in the Russian Federation should primarily be focused on minimizing the risks associated with user identification, as well as determining the legal status of decentralized autonomous societies (DAOs), organizing centralized examination of protocols and preventing cyber attacks.