The purpose of this project is to research how the law (especially EU law) should understand transaction execution and transaction (settlement) finality on Ethereum.
As financial regulation is being applied to public blockchains, especially through the EU Markets in Crypto-Assets Act, there is a risk that the key regulatory concepts will be copied from traditional finance without properly accounting for the special characteristics of Ethereum. The fact that Ethereum has adopted some labels which are also used in traditional finance for different purposes (‘transaction’, ‘finality’, ‘execution’) makes this even more challenging. It is thus important to develop understandings of the basic concepts used by financial regulation, which will not inadvertently hamper important goals like decentralisation.
