CTRL/SHIFT - 15 06 2026 CHAPEL STAGE - FRANCESCO PIERANGELI - DIGITAL ASSETS POLICYMAKERS MINDSET

Frco Pangeli Franchesco. Okay, thank you. Unlazo for Franchesco.

Today Francesco will speak about digital assets policy maker mindsets. Thank you.

Thank you. Just give me one second because we have to set it up also. Super warm in here. So I I really appreciate those of you who are staying regardless. Hello.

11. Control it's working. Yes, more or less. We also get it. All right, guys.

We ready? I mean those of you who survived the eat and survive the fact that it's midday so I know it's not easy. We're going to start. Hey Jaluca. Yes.

Jaluca is just coming in. You are part of the presentation. So you may want to you're one of the protagonist. Okay. So good morning everyone.

So today I'm here uh I I want to talk to you a little bit about a project that we have been working on over the past year or so on uh digital asset policy makers mindsets. So this is has a slightly different angle uh to the usual debate. So the debate is often reduced to something pretty much I would say basic uh regulators versus innovators or pro- crypto versus against anti-crypto. But the truth is that there is u uh there is a little bit more to it and for me what is the most interesting question here is how do policy makers think about technology in the first place. So because once you understand their mindset you can actually understand how come we observe different policy outcome.

So let's start first and foremost a little bit about me. Who are you who are you seeing on stage? So my name is Franchesco Pirangeli. I'm a a proud Italian as well apart from being British too. Uh living in the UK for a long time but I'm the director of the master in fintech program at the University of Birmingham which is now running successfully for around six years now and I also where uh the University of Birmingham also teach a module on blockchain and digital assets and financial applications.

So my work obviously focuses more on financial innovation and uh in the UK I regularly engage with UK parliament with regulators with central bank different stakeholders on digital assets. Um I'm also I also am an academic yes but also try as much as possible to engage with the industry and that's you know that's why I'm here today. Uh and I'm also affiliated with the CFA Institute uh in the UK. So before co coming back to academia, I worked in banking particularly at JP Morgan and UBS. Okay.

So enough about me uh and let's move on and see what we are going to talk about today. So today I'm presenting the tech regulation mindset index. You can you can scan the QR code and you can have direct access to the survey. I promise you it's not boring. I promise you it's not long.

is very easy to feel and is super uh entertaining. So please do not uh be scared. So this work uh what come from? So this work is part of a broader research agenda that we have been doing on technology regulation and policymaker mindset. So the idea is to explore not just in not what is the outcome but what precedes the outcome in terms of uh in in terms of the mindset that is then put to test when it comes to drafting regulation in the space.

So basically in other words before a a policy maker decides what to do with the technology they usually they make assumptions on that technology in the first place. So they make assumption about risk about markets about innovation about how to think about sovereign rights and institutional whether or not institutions should be entrusted with this new technology. So those assumption matter a lot when it comes to then drafting the actual regulation. So by before and I I'll show you later the we will go through the survey together but before doing so and I promise you this is going to be a presentation mostly made up of pictures. So for once you will have a visual aid rather than having to look look through bullet points and whatnot.

This is the only bullet points on the entire presentation. So where did it all started? So we start the idea was first discussed at the Ripple flagship uh research event in Singapore. This was called Uber connect and was all at uh the univers national university of Singapore in LA one year exactly one year ago June 2025. So during a panel, me being one of the four panelists, so we have we I have you know I was on the panel with a senior executive from Ripple along with colleagues from Noval Lisbon and IE Madrid at two very famous business schools in Europe that also became you know my collaborators on this project.

So we were discussing why different countries can look at the same technology blockchain and yet reach completely different completely completely different regulatory conclusions. I mean think about the UAE versus say Europe. The UAE passed the very first um the very first crypto related or blockchain related regulation back in 2018. And Mika as you all know just came about last year and they are very very different. So and even within countries the approach can change substantially over time.

Think about the US under Joe Biden and the conversation that was happening at that time and then the US under Trump completely different the same country completely different outcomes in terms of policym. So as you can see that is where the idea of mapping policymaker mindset started to become more concrete during our panel there. And you know for those of you who think that just academics that just travel and speak well we travel and speak connect and eventually we also start collaborations sometimes international collaborations and again the idea here is to map policymaker mindset. So we wanted to try and figure figure things out in a way that would be also visually pleasing because again as I mentioned earlier if you you nobody likes surveys we all hate service we always we always tap no not interest in service please don't I have no time for service so we need to create we need to do something perhaps using leveraging the latest technology so the idea would be to have an AI enabled survey where people can just answer in their own words. They can just tap or can they just add random words that they that that basically comes into mind pops in your mind when you look through the eight long question survey.

So it's just eight questions. So you can literally compute it in eight taps or you can add more context and they've been an AI um trying to map and well analyze and map those answer into one of six preliminary uh mindset characteristics. So we have sovereign security oriented precautionary innovation first rights and justing oriented utilitarian decentralized. So those are the very first six mindset that we kind of um come up with. But again this is very much a work in progress.

It's just the beginning looking at different uh uh literature on this on the on the topic we decide to go for this and by the end of the survey because you know your time is precious to us and to you. You don't you don't get like something like okay give me all your data and then I can provide you something. No we don't sell anything. We are academics. So what what will happen here is that you will get a nice a nice um a nice octagon which is inspired by v video games from you know football video games that for those of you who have played them in the in the past which is basically showing you where do you stand along with a nice diagram which also shows you uh where do you stand relate relating to the different uh variables that are displayed over the as in the vertical axis and horizontal axis.

So we started so we started this in Singapore. We developed some sort of like nice mapping and then we presented our first uh well we we started to discuss this idea in different conferences. So, one was uh in November, sorry, sorry, in October 2025 at the London Blockchain Conference, which was which is a massive event that happens every year in London with over 4,000 attendees. We had I basically moderated a panel trying to understand policy m policy makers mindset better and we had two policy makers on the panel. Uh one was one one is Baroness Udin which is a member of the house UK house of lords along with the um uh Alon cares which is the for is a former being in parliament for 20 years and on top of that he also serve as ministry secretary of state for Wales.

So it was interesting to see to pick up their you know using that as a proof of concept showing we also show that very preliminary QR code. Alo a lot of we got a lot of answers or replies from the audience as well. They were not all policy makers of course. There were not 4,000 uh policy makers in the room but there were a few along with a lot of entrepreneurs a lot of builders a lot of um a a lot of people that are part of this community being crypto being blockchain being more institutional. Then after that and that is the reason why I'm also here today is we we were teaming up with JLuk's team to do something interesting uh at the house of laws.

So this is February 2026 and uh we uh basically come up with this idea of gathering a few policy makers in the room particularly at the House of Commons. also in the UK parliament and having the you know hosting a dinner there would provide us an opportunity to present our um our survey more directly to the audience that that survey is intended to be cuttered to and u it was it was it was great because was a smallish as in you can see the table was quite long I think we had look if I'm not mistaken about 100 people in attendance uh about a dozen uh a dozen or so policy makers or members of parliament or members of the house of of the house of lords and as you can see Jula was also pretending to laugh at my jokes while checking his phone. Uh so it was it was a very pleasant evening. But one thing that we l we were able to take away from that evening was that that the first result show that people recognize themselves into those tensions. So people tend to lean even before um taking the sur so basically before approaching UK digital UK digital asset regulation they tend to lean towards be more precautionary or more innovationoriented or being more decentralized or being more sovereign um sovereign oriented in that in that front.

So that was a good confirmation. It's funny how sorry

this one. No

mindset. This one.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean obviously this is u this this was done by me just a bit a little bit randomly but I will show you uh we will perfect perfect uh perfect sideway to the actual index because now I'm going to go through with you through the survey and we will and I I basically will present to you the results of what the cryptoincline uh uh survey. So basically someone who is very much pro crypto would fair in the index. So this is how it looks like when you open up. I just wanted to mention here I don't know if you can see that but you know there's a privacy notice.

Again we are very much privacy aware. So we don't collect any of your personal data. So you can freely fill out the form. That's it. No quest.

No, we're not going to we're not going to keep any of your personal data. So, and then I have eight questions. So, the first one is about you know to protect its security a country should control foreign technology implementation with its within its border. You need you you may agree disagree strongly agree disagree and then you can also explain in your own words again that is what that is the AI element. You don't need to be confined in a box.

You can express freely. You don't need to express anything. You just can just eight taps and you're done. Uh so this is about you know the security sovereign and precaution. Then we have the uh this is yes question three and four it's about innovation rights and justice.

So here we're trying to test for another tension which is between innovation first thinking and rightbased thinking. What do we mean by innovation first and right base? So the innovation first mindset asks how do we attract builders capital and talent before the opportunity moves elsewhere. And this is something that I know that you know the south of Italy is also thinking about a lot. Uh that matters because clearly technology does not wait for the perfect policy.

techn builders, entrepreneurs, they go where they're treated best or supposedly uh certainly contexts that are more receptive towards a certain technology, they also tend to reap most of the benefits. It's a kind of a winner take all. So at the end of the day, it's up to us. Uh but again, it's not just up to us. It's about our it's about our mindset.

Where do we start? So and finally we have sorry then we have question five and six which is more utilitarian. So there is the utilitarian trade-off on the one hand. So if a new technology benefits society and also the decentralized participation. So if the new technology benefits society overall some negative effects can be acceptable yes or no strongly agrees or not agreedable.

And this is important because you know when it comes to uh there is no perfect win-win situation. You always have some winners and losers, pros and cons. And it's important for to understand whether you are waiting more on the pros or the cons. So you are more conservative in that in that regards and also philosophically where do you stand on the centralization versus decentralization. This goes back to the point on trust institutional how how uh how trustworthy local institutions are and how much do you think the state should intervene in um in the in the regulation of the new technology.

Final point is uh central authority and compliance versus speed. Again this slide capture very clearly that tension. Central government regulation is necessary to keep order in fast changing technologies. Yes or no? Delaying innovation for the sake of compliance often causes more harm than good.

Where do you stand on that on with that statement? Right. So this is again one of the core dilemmas in digital assets like bad regulation kills innovation but no regulation kills the sector or the trust in that sector. And this is my result for what would probably be aligned with I would suspect most of the audience. So most of the audience here and perhaps a few policy makers as well in attendance um will probably be uh pointing at you know a more decentralized more pro- innovation and utilitarian meaning there is there there are there are economic rents to capture here.

So there is a a case for more innovation. There is a case for take advantage of this opportunity and we should do that in a very lean and decentralized way rather than waiting for understanding every single aspect of the technology and along with as promised you get a mapping towards a mapping towards your um your the different five score versus the different six mindset. set along with the octangle figure over here. The octagon sorry here along and finally you get also in uh where do you stand you know is a type of map which helps you understand and go beyond the the uh labels and trying to understand where do you place yourself on the axis. So you have neutral uh so you have the progressive so you are positive or negatively corrected to being progressive or protectionist clearly here this is a very much on the negative in terms of protectiveness and very much on the positive in terms of progressiveness so that's why I say this is a very much a pro- crypto pro- digital asset uh result and then you have a much more detailed analysis in terms of for every single reply, you get so some sort of like a couple of sentences that explain even more your uh rational and finally you have an overall summary.

The overall summary gives you a full picture of your results in a written form. So again you get the summary you get the axis where do you stand and you have an octagon which shows you what is your uh where do you stand in terms of policymaker mindset and those are the preliminary results that we very preliminary results that we got from the event that we did at the UK uh in the House of Commons in the UK in the UK parliament. And as you can see there is a there is a decent uh uh correlation with political inclination when it comes to utilitarianism and sovereignty. So for instance in other words if a if a policy maker sees this as an opportunity okay it actually transferred that vision into the regulation. At the same time, if a if a if a policy maker is very much concerned about sovereignty and you know the fact that another technology is not governed by local institutions that also reflects very clearly in the potential draft for a regulation while others are much less correlated.

And in terms of future sessions, we are hopeful hope a hopeful that we will be able to take this uh survey uh onto new other organize more sessions in other parliaments across Europe to make our sample more statistically significant and that will include the Italian parliament that's why we have you know we have been having conversation with local MPs along with the one in Spain and Portugal giving that this project is very much a collaboration effort between University of Birmingham I Madrid uh Nova in Lisbon and we also have some partnership and links with Berkeley UC Berkeley uh across the ocean. So perhaps you know we will do this first in Europe which makes most sense from a regratory standpoint uh and then after touring uh and getting a statistically significant uh u uh sample from Europe we will probably go and do that in the US as well. So that's pretty much from from me. I think we are on time perfectly on time. First time an academic is perfectly on time.

I'm happy to hear that as well. So if you have any questions please do feel free to ask. Uh otherwise we can also looking forward to connect as well later.

Look you know about this more than I do. So why are you asking me a question?

I want to make you a question first of all to thanks to thank you that you are here but also because uh we want as a community what you're doing. We would like actually to bring more leads to this survey. So my question is like more as a strategic question how we can help you like uh are you interested just to interview MPs uh or to send this link to Italian MPs or any type of institutional member because for example yesterday we also had concavi that represent the people in the cabinet under 35 years old that are quite 30 people right so let me know how we can help and what is the target that you're looking for

absolutely so yes going back to your uh to going back to your question. Yes, we are open to uh examine or use this survey as widely as possible. Again, we are academics. We build tools that perhaps can be helpful and can inform policy makers. It would be good to have different demographics uh on these u on this survey as well.

The policy makers that are in charge today are helpful for us to understand what is what is this current situation given that they are the ones who are currently drafting regulation. It would be great to have their idea, but then we can certainly compare and perhaps uh evidence clearly evidence a mismatch between the policy maker policy makers mindset versus the mindset of younger under 35 people or perhaps people that are the builders. And then we can also show to policy makers look this is how the younger under 35 builders look like and then they we can show them their mindset. So basically showing them how different the under 35 think in terms of digital asset compared to u MPs currently current sitting MPs and that will be a great example to inform policy and say hey look guys you may think this way about this you may feel this way but actually the mindset of the younger talents and generation is very different and if you don't take action they will probably go uh somewhere somewhere else and build somewhere else.

Thank you. Thank you, Francesco from University of Birmingham.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Now.