As counsel for Washington, DC law firm BuckleySandler LLP, Amy Davine Kim advises clients in the areas of US regulation of international business and financial services, with a focus on AML/BSA compliance and digital payments. Kim has been increasingly active in the digital currency space, recently working with North Carolina lawmakers to shape state regulation.
Here, Kim outlines the biggest stories from 2015 with a focus on how regulation is affecting the strategies of both startups and incumbents in the bitcoin and blockchain industry. It has been said that if bitcoin had first focused on its underlying blockchain technology rather than its payments capabilities, it may have gained wider adoption sooner. 2015, it seems, has been the year to confirm that theory.
State and federal regulators have spent most of 2015 focused on the risks attendant to the use of virtual currency. These include the lack of consumer protection and anti-money laundering (AML) risks; a continued struggle to define virtual currency (is it "currency", "money", "property", "security", "commodity"); and how to create a workable regulatory framework due to its unique attributes and decentralized nature.
Still, technology companies and financial institutions have pressed forward.
Some companies have focused on providing a global payment and remittance network with the blockchain to expand financial access for the unbanked and underbanked.
Global financial institutions, consulting firms, and investment funds, in turn, have spent most of 2015 sidestepping the regulatory debate, instead investing dollars and manpower into the study and rollout of blockchain technology in a broad array of applications beyond payments. Private ledger push
Underpinning this investment is the belief that a distributed ledger, whether private or public, can be part of a solution to a number of inherent problems in the current financial system at large, including efficiencies of cost and time in transferring all […]
