We don’t need no regulation

Regulation is part of life, in any advanced economy if you are going to sell goods or services be they digital or physical regardless of the industrial sector the responsible entity will more than likely be subject to regulation of some sort.

So far Blockchain companies have found this out the hard way. Initially, their response was to claim that it can’t apply and those that try are stifling innovation. Realising this began to alienate the very people they need to grow (those with money) they evolved their position to be we are happy to be lightly regulated to stop bad actors in our ecosystem.

However, even this conversation has only occurred within a very narrow expression of the blockchain ecosystem, specifically cryptocurrency trading. Regulating trading has pretty much taken up all the air in the room however as security engineers we know the regulatory landscape is much broader than that.

So this episode is about the other regulatory classes, like privacy, financial, compliance and even standards. We’re going to delve into the purpose they serve in web2 and ask whether it would need to change in order to accommodate web3 or vice versa. We’ll also lightly probe if there is any value in having any of these classes of regulation for web3 in the first instance.