Blockchain technology can be leveraged to record information securely, ranging from public sector data to private records. It has the potential of being ubiquitous due to its far-reaching use cases and revolutionary features. The deployment of blockchain technology can radically transform corporate and government operations and services. The blockchain legislative landscape is rapidly evolving, and an in-depth analysis is provided to offer a legal and contextual perspective of the regulatory trends across the globe. Part I explores the widespread use of blockchain technology for various industries and business applications. It also outlines two types of legislation that can be enacted, namely enabling and prohibitive legislation, to advance the policy objectives of a country. Part II examines the regulatory responses of various countries relating to blockchain use cases and applications.
TopBackground
Blockchain technology is a tamper-proof digital ledger that records data, transactions, and digital assets in a distributed manner without the need for central authorities or intermediaries to process and validate the data. (Suda et al., 2017) Therefore, unlike a centralized system, the decentralized structure of blockchain is not susceptible to a single point of failure nor responsible for the entire task as the workload is distributed to the “computing nodes”.(Raj et al., 2020) Every node maintains the same encrypted copy and can “record, store and update” the ledger. (Furlonger & Uzureau, 2019; Quasim, 2020) The decentralized structure ensures transparency, anonymity and efficiency of the blockchain ecosystem. (Bashir, 2018) Besides that, consensus mechanisms are utilized in blockchain to deal with “faults” in a distributed system, to ensure that all the participating nodes provide an agreement towards a single source of truth. (Bashir, 2018) The participating nodes on the blockchain network maintain and rely on the same distributed ledger, which functions as a “golden record” and is immutable. (Suda et al., 2017) The immutability of blockchain suggest that transaction data located on blockchain networks are tamper-evident in that they cannot be eliminated or altered easily. (Politou et al., 2019) The term “immutable” means “perpetual after some time or unfit to be changed”. (Kumar et al., 2020) In the realm of blockchain, this term is interpreted as “practically immutable, for all intent and purposes”, and immutability can be achieved with the assistance of a “cryptography hash value”. (Kumar et al., 2020; Raj et al., 2020) Blockchain technology was first proposed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008 where a paper on bitcoin was published. (Nakamoto, 2008) The paper suggested an electronic payment system that allows payment to be made from one willing party to another, directly without reliance or interference from third-party intermediaries. (Hughes, 2017; Suda et al., 2017)