05-28, 16:00–16:25 (CET), Root
Blockchain is an EU innovation priority, and many initiatives have emerged in finance and the real economy. Now, the focus is shifting towards decentralised spaces, from Web3 and metaverses to DeFi and DAOs. What does this mean for start-ups, developers and regulators? Which role do civil rights, including privacy, play? And how can sandboxes and co-learning help projects to develop and scale?
The focus will lie on new developments since last summer that have not yet been widely discussed. These include 1) how we approach tokenisation, 2) what we can expect from the next cohort in our European Blockchain regulatory Sandbox, and 3) how could a legal wrapper for DAOs look like that supports (and does not fight against) self-organisation and decentralisation.
I might also include a reference to the importance of civil liberties that underlie this approach, including the benefits of privacy-enhancing technologies.
Last but not least, I will give insights into how we organise our policy work on these topics and how participants can engage with us to make their voice heard and help us do a better job.
Dr. Joachim Schwerin is Principal Economist in the unit in charge of Responsible Business Conduct within the Directorate-General Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW) of the European Commission. He is responsible for developing the policy approach of DG GROW towards the Token Economy and Distributed-Ledger Technologies as well as their applications for industry and SMEs. His current focus lies on developing positive framework conditions for DAOs and Web3. In the financial domain, he contributed to the Digital Finance Strategy, including the MiCA Regulation, and the preparatory work for the Digital Euro. Previously, he coordinated the European Commission's industrial and competition policies and worked on SME access to finance. Joachim holds a PhD from Dresden University of Technology and was Post-Doc Research fellow at the London School of Economics' Economic History Department before he joined the European Commission in 2001.