Digital assets project conference 26th June 2019

A conference was held at Harris Manchester College on 26th June 2019 at which members of the digital assets project presented research papers for discussion and comment.

The first presentation, examining sovereign digital currencies, with some thoughts on the Libra currency proposed by Facebook, was given by Anton Didenko (University of New South Wales). Edmund Schuster (LSE) presented a paper entitled ‘Cloud Crypto land: The Empty Promise of Cryptoassets and Smart Contracts’ and Hin Liu (MPhil candidate, University of Oxford) presented his research on the nature of crypto-securities in the form of a comment on that paper. There was a joint presentation by Charles Mooney (University of Pennsylvania) and Henry Chong (Fusang) on ‘Custody and the New Intermediation’, reflecting on of the themes of the conference, which was the important role custodians and other intermediaries play in the way in which digital assets are held and transferred. David Fox (University of Edinburgh) led a discussion on crypto-assets and the nature of monetary value, and the day ended with a presentation on the implications of crypto-custodians from Matthias Haentjens, Tycho de Graaf and Ilya Kokorin (Leiden University). All the presentations elicited lively debate from the attendees, some of whom attended from around the world via Zoom. 

The project is continuing and will, in particular, support the individual research of its members as well as providing a focus for discussion and materials for all those who are working in this area. For more information, see https://www.law.ox.ac.uk/research-and-subject-groups/digital-assets.

This project is undertaken by the Commercial Law Centre, and is generously sponsored by Fusang.