Blockchain Legal Resource

On November 22, 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed into law a two-year moratorium against granting permits to crypto mining operations that “are operated through electric generating facilities that use a carbon-based fuel.” Renewable sources of energy are not impacted.

Thursday, December 1, 2022
1:30–2:30 pm ET

Feeling at sea about crypto and NFTs? Well, no wonder: existing laws that govern the transfer and financing of assets were last updated just before Captain Jack Sparrow first appeared on the big screen. An innocent time, when we knew how to transfer and finance not only gold doubloons, but many other assets. But nobody envisioned wanting to transfer and finance intangible digital assets such as crypto. The proliferation of cryptocurrencies and other digital assets, and the related new financing and investment structures, have caused ...

On November 10, 2022, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) announced the publication of a “complaint bulletin” analyzing consumer complaints relating to crypto assets. The CFPB periodically releases a “complaint bulletin” to summarize key trends among the financial products and services complaints it receives. By devoting an entire bulletin to crypto assets, the CFPB may be foreshadowing greater scrutiny of the asset class and increased enforcement activity in the space.

On October 18, 2022, the European Commission published a report, titled Information Frictions and Public Policies: Approaching the Regulation and Supervision of Decentralized Finance (“DeFi”) (the “Report”). The Report discusses the need to adapt existing policy frameworks to account for the change brought about by DeFi to the underlying information structure upon which financial services are provided. Unlike traditional finance, DeFi applications provide financial services based on blockchain technology, i.e., without requiring any intermediary agent and instead relying on automated protocols that are encoded in public digital contracts universally accessible and maintained by an open pool of pseudonymous miners.

On September 29, 2022, the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (“FinCEN”) issued final regulations (the “Final Rule”) implementing the comprehensive beneficial ownership reporting requirements of the Corporate Transparency Act (“CTA”), a critical part of the Anti-Money Laundering Act of 2020 (the “AMLA”).

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