Crypto Securities and Other Digital Assets: Aspects of Substantive and Regulatory Law

Abstract

Abstract This chapter reviews the dematerialization of securities that has been the dominant topic in securities law and regulation since the paper crunch in the late 1960s. It discusses common issues in the substantive legal framework for digital securities, including an overview over the regulation of digital securities. It also talks about the blockchain or distributed ledger technology (DLT), which refers to a group of technologies that have a database that is shared across a network of multiple sites and participants within a network that have their own identical copy of the ledger. The chapter looks at the security and accuracy of the assets stored in the ledger that are maintained by using crypto technologies. It refers to blockchain as one of the several possible data structures in a DLT system that is characterized by the fact that its entries are combined in blocks.