[2017-06-22]The EU and blockchain: taking the lead?

[joshy23]

The EU and blockchain: taking the lead?

Introduction

Long time the European Union has taken a positive, but wait-and-see attitude towards blockchain and distributed ledger technology. Both related to use cases and regulatory intervention. But that is changing rapidly. Last week the European Commission announced the launch of its #Blockchain4EU Project enlarging their scope to more than FinTech applications. This proves that the EU is taking steps (may be) to become one of the leading economic blocks in the blockchain race. It may therefore be interesting to take a closer look at what the plans/initiatives are from the various EU institutions such as European Commission, European Parliament, ECB, ESMA and others related to blockchain.


https://www.finextra.com/blogposting/14216/the-eu-and-blockchain-taking-the-lead

[d5000]

The interesting part for me is the one talking about regulation of virtual currencies (I still fail to capture the "inmense potential" of private blockchains, so the rest of the article was not too interesting for me):

[...]In this proposal only those engaged in exchanging between virtual and fiat currencies are included.

Virtual currency to virtual currency exchanges are not covered (for example, Bitcoin-to-Ether exchanges will not be regulated). And only those wallet providers offering custodial services “of credentials necessary to access virtual currencies” are to be included in the legislation.

So there is no "harder" regulation planned, like some have speculated in the last months (e.g. about prohibiting anonymous cryptocurrencies like Monero). So the planned regulation is mostly of the same kind than what already is law in most of the member states.

[iamTom123]

This development is just proving that actually anybody who is in his right mind can always appreciate the beauty of the blockchain technology and so those in power can use their creative prowess inorder to take advantage of the many benefits this new revolutionary system can do to them and their people.

This is just actually the tip of the iceberg as we should expect that many industries would be adopting the blockchain technology on their respective business and organization. The thing is...when there could be a critical number of adopters of the technology it can open up a flood of followers.

Definitely, if there is one sure thing, there is a great future for the blockchain technology and we are lucky enough here to be part of the pioneering adopters.