Navigating the Regulatory Spring in the EU | Mariana de la Roche - INATBA

[Music] okay great so good morning or good afternoon wherever you are uh if you are here of course good morning um my name is Mariana laoch um the director of the bid B and today I have the fantas to explain you what we have been up to uh when it comes to regul at the European level in 20 minutes so I'm just going to jump in directly to it so just a little bit of context I think that is important to understand why regulation is uh one of the key topics that we are uh seeing right now in the industry before all of this um kind of like uh energy that we are putting on the on the at the regulation what we have seen is that there was a lot of like projects that were launched in the different markets um whether you were in Europe the us or Asia and the issue here is that if you were launch uh without a regulatory framework you don't have legal certainty or Clarity of what would happen in the future which puts also investors in a difficult position because they really don't know what is going to happen in that particular region and if some of the projects are going to be the listed or are going to become illegal so what we have seen in the past 5 years is that this is changing and it also changed the mindset it changed the mindset of the industry from we don't want to and we can be regulated to actually see regulation as something good that can bring more legitimacy to the industry which at the same time uh supports the adoption so um let me tell you about what was happening in Europe before marikar marikar is the marketing crypto um marketing crypto assets regulation and before M we have like me fit which was uh focusing on financial or is focusing on financial instruments is also a directive not a regulation so it has different implications uh we also have the EU securization regulation also for Securities and we have National jurisdictions this creates a lot of difficulties for the projects uh in the European region because basically if you have a license in Germany doesn't mean that you can operate in France you will also need to go to France and uh and get a license there so we have like different kind of initiatives also going on and different regulations uh before uh marikar one of them was the DLT pilot regime which was trying to create an environment where projects in the DLT Market could go and taste their Solutions in a safe environment the DLT pilot regime is still ongoing and we also have the transfer and fund regulation this was really famous uh so to speak because it created some thresholds so basically if you uh do transactions over €1,000 whether you do it in one time or a cumulative you will need to comply with TFR this doesn't apply to peer-to-peer transactions which means self-hosted wallets that are using between um uh individuals are not covered in the transfer on fund regulation so now Mika com into place and Mika creates like really different um uh perceptive perception of what is going to happen in the European market so first of all it creates a taxonomy I'm going to go a little bit more in depth into the taxonomy itself but it also tells you like which entities are going to be part of this regulation so who can issue a stable coins or e-money tokens or asset refer tokens uh and uh who can actually do the offering and how they can do it and one important thing that MAA lets like leaves out of the regulation is nfts and like nfts with an asterisk uh and defi as long as you are truly decentralized and not decentralized only by name the reason of doing this too is because the regulator considered that was too early and it could block innovation so they wanted to see more what was coming with the development in the in the industry and in the market before actually setting the rules so now when it comes to marar I told you about the taxonomy there are like three tokens that are part of mikar aset reference tokens eony tokens and utility tokens and this is really really important because it sets some rules for example what do you need to do and which Li licenses and requirements you will need to uh put in place in order to offer eony tokens uh and the same for asset referent tokens there are some specific uh uh requirements that church according to uh the type of asset that you want to that you want to uh issue or offer and this is really really important because it's the first taxonomy that we will see at the European level when it comes to the difference between the tokens I'm not going to go really into what is each of those like you can see it on the slide um uh and yeah this is like the May overview uh what is important is that like mear actually how it says uh here it just like actually like brings more clarity into how it's going to work the European market and more important it actually helps the uh the industry to operate in Europe as a un IFI market right cuz like once you get a m license you can uh have like you can operate in the whole European market as long as you notified in which countries do you want to uh do you want to be um but this is not the only thing that is happening when it comes to regulation I mean like marikar is the biggest one but this presentation is not just about mikar we also have couple of initiatives being negotiated right now project liability directive the payment service directive psd3 uh there's a lot of conversations about the digital Euro if you have been following um the open frame Finance framework we also highlight the payment service regulation and there are some uh regulations that we are expecting to see uh but they are not uh like in place yet or they're not being negotiated there's a lot of going on regarding the metaverse there's a lot of initiatives about the virtual world um we already have the data act this is really important when when it comes to Smart contracts and now we are expecting or we hope to see some smart contract standardization a set of rule coming directly from from from from the European institutions we expect also to see something in regards to nfts and Defi and when it comes to asgs and sustainability requirements this is one of the major areas there is al already like some rtas being discussed by the commission uh to comply with the reporting of sustainability metrics by uh Casp crypto as a service providers and this is one of the requirements for for mikar so basically we have like this said uh that us innovate China develops and EU regulates and we have something really important here that is the Brussels effect so basically what this mean is that what we are seeing Europe is most likely to be replicated in other regions so it is like there's a lot of potential that we will see initiatives such as m car uh in other jurisdictions um this is kind of like a joke that we have uh and like the Brussels uh network uh basically it was crypto winter but it was the re regulatory spring because we saw like a proliferation and different regulations worldwi so we have El Salvador was a really interesting one because they made Bitcoin a legal tender uh us you have seen everything that is going on with the SEC uh and Securities and the HTS and everything that came out of that uh still discussions going on there uh Dubai just publish the DLT Foundation regime which is actually intended to bring more um H projects into the industry Qatar is also uh in the process of producing a regulatory framework for crypto assets which is really interesting because is focusing on tokenization and they have a similar approach to lickstein and then we have have Japan who already has a similar regulation to mikar since 2020 um one of the things that I wanted to discuss today is the important of this like fostering dialogue between the industry and the regulator because if we want the regulator to come with rules that doesn't block Innovation they will need to understand what is it that they're regulated and how actually like the industry works and the technology Works in order to be able to understand where regulation is needed so I wanted to talk about what we are doing in Europe I call it like the Watch Dogs because these are like different associations mostly at the European level inpa which I'm also a part of the board of directors of inpa is a global organization we have the European blockchain Association the European crypto Initiative blockchain for Europe and uh the digital currencies as well um basically what we are doing is that we are like keeping an eye in absolutely everything that is going on whether it's at the European level of the national level and we as an industry come together and reply to the consultations of the regulator acpr is uh the banking authorities on FR on France and they have a huge consultation when it comes to defi which we also reply with the industry and the support of the gbbc and the EU both which is the European blockchain observatorium Forum uh expert panels and also in Napa members and the data act open letter you can Google it this was a massive effort uh when it comes to uh the explanation that the industry did about what is the difference between uh a smart contracts um and and other and other and especially when it comes to access controls of a smart contracts this was a big big big debate we have there which is really interesting to to see uh because this might impact uh smart contracts that are deployed in the future uh we also created a report where we uh promoted industry players to sit in round taes with Regulators to discuss different topics uh these was the four topics that we discussed on the round taes one of them was self-hosted wallets uh and reusable kyc especially when it come to anti-money laundry and financial of terrorism prevention and then we also have a discussion on nfts and what is the potential of nfts Beyond art so actually what is a nonfunctional token uh we have one on tokenization of the real economy huge topic right now in Europe one of the most proactive and like like actually like Advanced uh regulations that I have seen in leein when it come to this because uh the transfer of the token actually means the transfer of the ownership of the real world asset so I would really recommend you to take a look on that one and then the cost of Regulation from smmes uh this was also like a big discussion it's like how Innovation can block uh innov how regulation can block Innovation if it's not done accordingly to the needs of the industry so one of the big things oh sorry it looks so blurry but like you can also like Google this is public information one of the things we did last year in November with uh inapa blockchain for Europe um the European blockchain Association and the European crypto initiative was launch a Manifesto we did this in November in an event organized by the European commission by Gro and the manifesto was our vision of blockchain in Europe so basically how blockchain can push forward European goals and we identified three areas of uh prioritization one was the unified Market the second one was the digital economy and the third one was everything in regards to sustainability and social impact uh and this is actually uh one of the topics that I'm going to discuss today because uh I've been leading the sustainability and social impact efforts of inpa for the past four years and basically advocating for the use of blockchain for good and one of the things that we also like that we are doing right now is the BC 100 plus which is also a big big initiative that we have with the patronage of the un uh with the patronage actually of the 7070 president of the United Nations General Assembly uh and is a um a reply to a call to action of how we can use Technologies for good how we can use blockchain to push forward the achievement of the sustainable development goals and the UN Charter value so one of the things we do a lot of things with the BC 100 plus but one of the things that I wanted to discuss to you uh with you today was the best in class uh cuz we are bringing together not only blockchain projects working on sustainability and social impact but blockchain projects that are developing solutions that might be useful for organizations at in the development sector so one example can be digital identities I don't know if you have seen But the unhcr which is the refugee Office of the United Nations is already playing or like exploring experimenting whatever you want to call it with digital identities so what would be the potential of how digital identities would you have like Crisis where people is actually like leing their houses no time to collect any certificate if they have digital identities they can one access to Aid easily H is easy for to organize also for the UN how to distribute it but also they can have credentials there so when they come to a a country that received them they can prove what they were doing before who they were and have all of their credentials connected to their identity um so the best in class is actually identify find projects that are already deployed that have certain level of maturity that can be used for others as examples to implement these Solutions as well so here there are like some of the criterias that we are uh looking and study with the group uh blockchain of course need to be vital to the use case it needs to be Beyond uh a pile of approve of con Concepts already commercialized we know it's working there scaling we want to see major private and public organizations involved because this also bring leg legitimacy so for example when you have the UN or when you have a governments already implementing the solution like the European uh blockchain service infrastructure Epsy uh already bring a level of trust right uh we also wanted to see that they have an active development team and this is really really important because this actually what like Pro that the project is been built and is growing uh and then there are um other uh set of requirements that are being study uh by the steering committee group that leads this initiative to identify uh these projects so I think that this was my last slide ah no well of course uh these are like some of the projects that we have already in the in the BC 100 plus so you can see some of the N you for sure know them uh REI da is huge uh at least in Europe I guess there are also like here um United Nations joint sta pension fund that also uh implementing digital IDE entities to manage the internal staff in the United Nations so they can have like easy access to the pension um once they they com com like have like the the the weeks or the time uh to to to to be there uh and we also have like project like demia that are in the here in the US that are working with like uh data trustability it's a really interesting project if you if you want to take take a look of them so that's like different different projects um climate change Coalition as well that are part of of of this initiative and basically we come together to try to understand and present solutions that cannot be only replicated by the blockchain space and like the blockchain bubble but actually can be deployed by organizations in the development sector and can make use of these tools to do what they do faster and more efficient which at the end is what we are looking uh with the different initiative um that I presented whether is the European Manifesto whether is the BC 100 plus whether is like all the regulatory efforts that we are putting in place are just with the aim of like supporting the blockchain ecosystem to scale and we can only scale as big as our bubble so of course we need to break out that bubble and bring those that are outside of the blockchain space to actually understand what is the value of the technology and how they can use it for what they are already uh doing in their organizations that was actually my last slide uh so if you one more information if you need um anything uh just just you can send me an email I'm going to also be here uh for the rest couple of days so thank you very much