Blockchain Papers

A. A. Kulikova, R.D. Zhmurko

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Erika J. Nash

No abstract is available for this record.

Jaeyun Kim

No abstract is available for this record.

Javier M. Rodríguez Olmos

Spanish Abstract: el contrato inteligente (smart contract) es una tecnología que permite la ejecución automatizada de un comando que sigue la lógica “si X entonces Y”, ante la verificación de una condición preestablecida. En combinación con la tecnología blockchain el contrato inteligente adquiere las características de descentralización, inalterabilidad y, sobre todo, de irreversibilidad. En este escrito se analiza el impacto del contrato inteligente en el derecho contractual, a partir de la distinción fundamental entre contrato inteligente y ‘contrato legal inteligente’. A partir de esa distinción se revisan algunas cuestiones que plantea esa tecnología al confrontarla con ciertos aspectos del contrato: su formación, su ejecución, su interpretación y la protección contractual del consumidor. El análisis lleva a concluir que el contrato inteligente, cuando cumple una función dentro de un contrato en sentido jurídico, no puede escapar a la influencia de los principios y reglas del derecho contractual. English Abstract: Smart contracts are a technology which enables the automated execution of a “if this-then that” function, upon the meeting of a predetermined condition. Combined with blockchain technology, Smart contracts become descentralized, tamper-proof and above all irreversible. This paper focuses on how Smart contracts impact on Contract law. On the basis of the distinction between Smart contract and ‘Smart legal contract’, I examine some issues arising from the interacción of Smart contract technology with some aspects of contract’s life cycle: formation, performance, interpretation, and contractual consumer protection. The outcome of the análisis Will show that Smart contracts, whenever they are imbedded in the context of a contract in a legal sense, cannot avoid the principles and rules of Contract law.

Florian Martin-Bariteau, Marco Pontello

No abstract is available for this record.

A. A. Volos

No abstract is available for this record.

Л. А. Новоселова, E. S. Grin

The article addresses the prospects of using distributed ledger technologies – blockchain and artificial intelligence – for the purpose of systematizing the rights to the results of intellectual activity for their subsequent commercialization. The authors describe the key characteristics of the distributed ledger technology and review various legal problems pertaining to the use of blockchain technologies. The authors draw conclusions regarding the prospects of using blockchain and artificial intelligence technologies as measures for rapid prevention and elimination of intellectual rights violations. They also express their views on the process of commercializing intellectual property and reducing the number of conflicts related to the inclusion of intellectual property objects into distributed ledger systems. The article was prepared with the financial support of the Ministry of Higher Education and Science of the Russian Federation within the framework of the research “Scientific and methodological support for the development of theoretical and applied legal structures (models) of accounting and disposal of rights to the results of intellectual activity (technology transfer)

Vladimir P. Kamyshansky, Garmshev, M. A., Anna S. Shekhovtsova, Екатерина Анатольевна Новикова · 5 authors

The authors examined the concept and signs of a smart contract through a comparative legal analysis of the legislation of Russia, Belarus, the EU and the USA. The key characteristics of a smart contract as a contract, its types, ways of development and improvement are highlighted and substantiated, the examples of smart contracts from the practice of these countries are given, problematic aspects of legal regulation in this sphere are identified

Michael Mayer

Die Blockchain Technologie hat das Potential die Wirtschaft im Zeitalter der Digitalisierung zu revolutionieren. In zentralisierten Organisationen werden die Entscheidungen von einem Verantwortlichen oder einer Gruppe getroffen. In der Blockchain gibt es keinen bestimmten Entscheidungsträger. Um eine Entscheidung zu treffen, muss ein Konsens erreicht werden. Um diesen Konsens zu erreichen, wird von jeder Blockchain Plattform ein so genannter Konsens-Mechanismus eingesetzt. Damit Blockchains ihr volles ökonomisches Potential ausschöpfen können, muss eine gute Skalierbarkeit gegeben sein. Doch dazu müssen Kompromisse in anderen Bereichen eingegangen werden. Das Blockchain-Trilemma besagt, dass man die drei Haupteigenschaften Skalierbarkeit, Sicherheit und Dezentralität immer zulasten der anderen erreicht, bzw. dass alle drei Eigenschaften nicht gleichzeitig maximiert werden können. Die implementierten Konsens-Mechanismen versuchen dieses Dilemma mit unterschiedlichen Ansätzen zu lösen. Daher sind sie einer der wichtigsten Aspekte sowie Unterscheidungsmerkmale der Blockchain Plattformen. Diese Arbeit bietet einen Überblick sowie eine technische Analyse über die zur Zeit existierenden Konsens-Mechanismen. Darüber hinaus werden Smart Contract Plattformen analysiert und die dort eingesetzten Konsens-Mechanismen detailliert beleuchtet. Außerdem wird die Umstellung des Konsens-Mechanismus von Proof of Work zu Proof of Stake in der Ethereum-Plattform anhand Ihres Einflusses auf zukünftige Smart Contracts analysiert. Die Analyse liefert einen Überblick über 62 Konsens-Mechanismen und 21 Smart Contract-Plattformen die im Moment eingesetzt werden. Weiter werden Kriterienkataloge vorgestellt, welche für den Vergleich von Smart Contract-Plattformen sowie deren Konsens-Mechanismen eingesetzt werden können.

Elena Voskresenskaya, Lybov Vorona-Slivinskaya, Lybov Achba

The study on issues of digital economy proved the current existence of the new “digital” economic reality. The traditional legal apparatus used for the statutory regulation of this new economic reality showed itself not only inefficient, but also significantly restraining the actively developing economic processes. In this regard, a plenty of practical and legal collisions occur related to the problems of identification of persons involved in civil-law transactions, property relations regarding digital economic turnover (for instance, relations concerning property rights in the field of distributed ledgers), registration of property rights and deals, regulation of banking line processes, formation of special protection models for relationships based on the use of digital technologies including issues of cybernetic and data security. The development of digital economy will inevitably influence legal principles and demand reconsidering some of doctrinal approaches to traditional legal models of regulating different types of economic activities. In this case, socially just changes in the legal regulation of economic activities should be primarily aimed at removing legal barriers that impede the development of digital economy, as well as at synchronizing legal rules with the technological features of economy’s functioning.

Ryan Hasting

Smart contracts are increasingly popular in business and law. Smart contracts are also becoming increasingly complex. Advances in technology allow smart contracts to handle far more intricate transactions than the traditional—and simple— vending machine example. With increased complexity comes increased responsibility. When parties rely on an attorney to review or draft a smart contract, that attorney must understand what he or she is reading or writing. Smart contracts, however, are not written in a language most attorneys can understand, let alone write. While a general description of the contract may be translated into plain English, the contract itself is written in code. If an attorney cannot read the contract itself—and can only read a general description of the contract—can the attorney claim in good faith that he or she possesses the competence necessary to understand the terms of the contract? If the attorney cannot understand the contract, he or she can be held liable for malpractice if the contract leads to results contrary to what the attorney claimed could or would occur. The implementation of smart contracts is likely to give rise to specialized requirements for attorneys drafting and advising on smart contracts. Special requirements are not unheard of in the legal community. For example, to become a patent attorney, one must take and pass the Patent Bar Examination and fulfill other requirements, such as obtaining a bachelor’s degree in specified fields of science or engineering. Similar requirements—either in the form of a smart contract certification or exam—should be developed not only as a measure of attorney competence, but also as a protection against malpractice suits brought forth by clients.

Rivneazot JSC, Vasyl Varavka

Recently smart contracts become more and more popular in such areas as initial coins offering (ICO), financial sector, international trade and public services. At the same time there is almost no legal regulation of smart contracts. There are unsuccessfull tries to regulate smart contracts bu security legislation. There are continuing discussions over whether a smart contract can be considered a civil contract and whether violated rights of the parties of smart contract could be protected in trail. The purpose of this article is to assess the practice of legal regulation of smart contracts worldwide and in Ukraine and to develop proposals for improvement of legal regulation of smart contracts. An analysis of law regulation of smart contracts in different countries of the world shows the initial state of the law in this area, significant differences between national systems of law and almost complete absence of judicial precedents. Most countries are trying to regulate smart contracts by securities and financial instruments legislation, which neither takes into account the economic nor legal nature of the smart contract. The greatest progress in legal regulation has reached Belarus, which has recognized the smart contract as a type of civil contract and cryptocurrency as the official means of payment. In Ukraine, despite the active implementation of blockchain technology in state registers, there is no legal regulation of smart contracts and cryptocurrency. The Government Concept of the development of digital economy and society for 2018 – 2020 and conclusions of financial regulators on the legal status of cryptocurrencies determine the need to develop legal regulation of the digital economy. In my oppinion, Ukraine should recognize the most widespread cryptocurrencies as official means of payment and issue its own state cryptocurrency. The legal regulation of tokens used in initial coins offering should be similar to the legal regulation of of debt securities. It is necessary to amend the civil legislation in order to recognize a smart contract as a type of civil contract expressed in the form of programming code and automatically executed in a distributed network. To minimize risks of smart contracts it is necessary to state requirements of mandatory identification of parties and to implement mandatory electronic application containing the essential terms of the contract which will have legal force in case of a programming code error and to resolve litigation between the parties.

А. В. Захаркина

СМАРТ-КОНТРАКТ В УСЛОВИЯХ ФОРМИРОВАНИЯ НОРМАТИВНОЙ ПЛАТФОРМЫ ЭКОСИСТЕМЫ ЦИФРОВОЙ ЭКОНОМИКИ РОССИЙСКОЙ ФЕДЕРАЦИИИсследование выполнено при финансовой поддержке

С.В. Одинцов, Mark James Mansour

The subject of this paper is the review of the feasibility and advisability of using smart contracts based on blockchain technologies for the legal regulation of relations to provide the exclusive rights to means of individualization (trademarks). Blockchain technology is one of the very promising fields in the area of digitalization of the economy, which continues to be constantly and actively developed. The use of selfexecutable transactions by subjects of civil (commercial) circulation is becoming increasingly relevant. However, it should be noted that law enforcement practice has yet to be formed in this area. The existing civil (commercial) law has recently begun to develop provisions defining the specifics of the circulation of so-called digital assets, which may also include exclusive rights and the results of intellectual activity, including trademark rights. So far, the existing legal regulation regarding the rights to digital assets (tokens) and the introduction of smart contracts into the circulation can hardly be called sufficient. The paper discusses the rationale for the feasibility and advisability of using smart contracts for registration of license agreements regarding the use of trademark rights. As a result of the study and practical proposal, the authors focus attention on the need for an internationally unified approach to using blockchain technologies for fixing the transfer (assignment) of exclusive rights to the results of intellectual activity.

Raffi Teperdjian

Smart contracts have the potential to improve many existing transactions and to enable entirely new business models. However, the technology supporting this new method of transacting is complex and the legal framework applying to it is somewhat unclear. Though theorised several decades ago, it was not until the advent of the distributed ledger technology known as blockchain that smart contracts were able to be practically implemented. This paper summarises the concept of smart contracts while providing the background and context of its development. It then distinguishes those smart contracts which are considered legally binding within the scope of US laws from those that may not have legal effect. Next, it provides an in-depth example of an exploitation of smart contracts and explores how the legal reaction to it is inadequate. To reduce the likelihood of future smart contract exploitations and to improve confidence for contracting parties, this article suggests adding explicit smart contract cybersecurity provisions to existing US legal frameworks. Specifically, I propose adapting several of the National Institute of Standards and Technology’s Federal Information Processing Standards to create minimum cybersecurity requirements for all legally binding smart contracts. I also examine the shortcomings of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act while identifying it as a piece of legislation ripe for reform which, if done adequately, may provide a legal deterrent to would-be cyber hackers of smart contracts.

Nevena Jevremović

No abstract is available for this record.

Peter Michaelson

No abstract is available for this record.

Carla Reyes

Several states have recently changed their business organization law to accommodate autonomous businesses—businesses operated entirely through computer code. A variety of international civil society groups are also actively developing new frameworks— and a model law—for enabling decentralized, autonomous businesses to achieve a corporate or corporate-like status that bestows legal personhood. Meanwhile, various jurisdictions, including the European Union, have considered whether and to what extent artificial intelligence (AI) more broadly should be endowed with personhood to respond to AI’s increasing presence in society. Despite the fairly obvious overlap between the two sets of inquiries, the legal and policy discussions between the two only rarely overlap. As a result of this failure to communicate, both areas of personhood theory fail to account for the important role that socio-technical and socio-legal context plays in law and policy development. This Article fills the gap by investigating the limits of artificial rights at the intersection of corporations and artificial intelligence. Specifically, this Article argues that building a comprehensive legal approach to artificial rights—rights enjoyed by artificial people, whether corporate entity, machine, or otherwise—requires approaching the issue through a systems lens to ensure that the legal system adequately considers the varied socio-technical contexts in which artificial people exist. To make these claims, this Article begins by establishing a terminology baseline, and emphasizing the importance of viewing AI as part of a socio-technical system. Part I then concludes by reviewing the existing ecosystem of autonomous corporations. Parts II and III then examine the existing debates around artificially intelligent persons and corporate personhood, arguing that the socio-legal needs driving artificial personhood debates in both contexts include: protecting the rights of natural people, upholding social values, and creating a fiction for legal convenience. Parts II and III also explore the extent to which the theories from either set of literature fits the reality of autonomous businesses, illuminating gaps and using them to demonstrate that the law must consider the socio-technical context of AI systems and the socio-legal complexity of corporations to decide how autonomous businesses will interact with the world. Ultimately, the Article identifies and leverages links between both areas of legal personhood to demonstrate the Article’s core claim: developing law for artificial systems in any context should use the systems nature of the technical artifact to tie its legal treatment directly to the system’s socio-technical reality.

Michael Buchwald

No abstract is available for this record.

Pietro Sirena, Francesco Paolo Patti

The main quality of a smart contract relies on the automation of contractual relationships, as the performance is triggered by an algorithm in turn triggered by the fulfilment of certain events. Most of the benefits arising from smart contracts are based on the ‘self-executing’ and ‘self-enforcing’ character, which represent a source of innovation for general contract law. Smart contracts use blockchain to ensure the transparency of the contractual relationship and to create trust in the capacity to execute the contract, which depends on the technology used. The aim of the present essay is to investigate whether and how blockchain technology platforms and smart contracts could be considered a modern form of private authority, which at least partially escapes the application of mandatory rules and traditional enforcement mechanisms. In particular, the authors will devote attention to innovative self-help mechanisms and dispute resolution systems, which can be depicted as ‘alternative’ insofar as they present themselves as independent from courts and other national state authorities.

Lennart Ante

No abstract is available for this record.

Victoria Dorofeeva, Lyudmila Kaverzina, Dmitry Zhmurov, Tatyana Krasnova · 5 authors

The authors enumerate and analyze key challenges that global financial and legal systems face in connection with the introduction of cryptocurrency. They present definitions of cryptocurrency used in international and Russian practice. The authors also study the court practice on crimes involving the use of bitcoins and examine the approaches to determining the legal status of cryptocurrency in foreign countries and in the Russian Federation. It is stated that at present the international regulatory practice lacks a common universal document that would regulate the use of digital (electronic) currencies. At the same time, a considerable number of foreign countries have already worked out their attitudes to virtual currency — ranging from the absolute prohibition of all operations to stimulating mining and payments in cryptocurrencies. The authors identify five key approaches to regulating the market of cryptocurrencies in international practice. They outline multiple risks connected with the partial substitution of official means of payment by cryptocurrencies. It is stated that in our country cryptocurrencies and operations involving them are now beyond the scope of law because cryptocurrencies are not recognized as an object of legal protection. However, a number of draft laws that regulate the issue and turnover of «virtual assets» are to be adopted in the near future. The authors identify key prerequisites for the use of effective regulatory approaches to operations with cryptocurrencies and the directions for the creation of a normative legal base for such operations in the Russian Federation. It is important to take measures and prevent the use of cryptocurrencies for the financing of criminal activities and terrorism. The authors use the analysis of the normative legal basis of the Russian Federation, existing theories and their own considerations to recommend an introduction of a favorable regime of cryptocurrency market regulation by implementing the best international practices whose essence (in general terms) is reflected in the clauses of this article.

M. M. Dolgieva

The article is devoted to the problems of qualification of various types of theft of cryptocurrency, theft of funds committed using cryptocurrency. The article deals with crimes related to the illegal sale of drugs for cryptocurrency and raises the question of the absence in the act of the offense under article 1741 of the Criminal code of the Russian Federation. The author studies the concepts of cryptocurrency and property within the framework of existing scientific opinions and analyzes the versatile judicial practice, which, in particular, tends to classify cryptocurrencies as types of property. The goals and objectives of the study are to determine the range of features and properties of the objects of crimes committed with the use of cryptocurrency, as well as committed against the cryptocurrency as an object of infringement. In the preparation of the article, mainly formal logical methods were used, as a result of which the author analyzes social and legal phenomena. The author concludes that the main feature of the evaluation of the object of crimes in sphere of circulation of cryptocurrency, is the presence of his property and cost characteristics, the possibility of determining the damage for the proper qualification of the offense. It is concluded that cryptocurrency may be the subject of corruption offenses on the basis of scientifically substantiated opinions about the presence of the paid nature of the benefit provided by the cryptocurrency. It is argued that the actions associated with the sale of narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances for cryptocurrency and subsequent actions to transfer cryptocurrency to Fiat money do not form part of the crime providing for liability for the legalization of proceeds from crime.

Roman Volodimirovich Yakovliev

The use of citizens` and legal entities` personal information is crucial for the protection of human rights at the current stage of society and information technology development. On the one hand, a high-quality system of processing and using this information can increase the level of citizen participation in government-making processes and assist on creating a human-centric approach in public administration, when the state will have all the necessary information to serve citizens (providing of all administrative services online, use of analytics to improve infrastructure, etc.). On the other hand, misuse and unauthorized access to personal data can lead to violations of citizens' rights, corruption and excessive bureaucracy in administrative procedures.At the same time, approaches to the protection of personal data should be not formal, but purely practical. The state policy should be based on the solution of real problems, which often require a complete revision of the systematic approaches, in this case the infrastructure of the state registers.Modern information technologies make it possible to implement large-scale changes in the business processes of collecting, storing and processing personal data of citizens. Moreover, such approaches make it possible to reduce bureaucratic burdens and minimize corruption risks.Distributed registry technology is a popular solution for improving the performance of government processes and enhancing eGovernment in the country. However, its application requires a proper assessment of the problem and its origins, as well as the outcomes that should be achieved