THE WEEK IN CRYPTO – LONDON TECH WEEK AND BLOCKCHAIN IRELAND LAUNCHED

Good Week Bad Week?

Liina and I are back again talking Good Week Bad Week in Crypto.

I have to confess that I am still buzzing from London. Last week

I was chairing the Blockchain 360 conference in the Excel centre on

June 13 and 14. Organised as part of the Informa group conference,

the Blockchain theatre was packed on both days.

Armed with headphones, mics and glasses (the last piece a nod to

my printing out my notes with smaller than usual fonts) it was

a very fast paced two days. I met up with my good friend Brian

Heinin who was also taking part in one of the panels and we hung

out that evening too – crashing the London Tech Week party in Shoreditch

where we met up with fellow Irishman Shane Kehoe of SVK Crypto

– the leading crypto fund in London. Shane is an amazing man and

his company is leading the way in all things crypto in London.

He hosts monthly meetups (where almost 1000 people attend) and

produces daily updates on the crypto market. His company also announced

last week that they were partnering with BlockOne, the organisation

behind the EOS blockchain, to jointly administer a $50million fund.

It’s all big numbers in crypto.

Highlights of the Conference was a panel on regulation

which featured Brian, founder of a Blockchain Europe group on Linkedin,

John Salmon (legal) Hogan Lovells, Nicole Sandler (legal) Barclays and Jeremy Millar

(chief of staff) ConsenSys (which was co-founded by the co-founder of Ethereum

and also recently opened offices in Dublin).

The big problem is that there is little or no regulation surrounding

Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) with various governments and financial

regulators looking to use existing financial regulation to apply to the

cryptocurrency market. None of the panel felt that was a

good idea as it is akin to comparing apples with oranges.

The US SEC uses the Howie test to see the new coins are securities or utilities.

The Howie test basically says that if a financial instrument is

easily traded, is expected to increase in value and that value will

both be promoted by the organisation behind it as well as the organisation

benefitted from the increase in value – then the coin is a

security and is subject to a whole raft of quite onerous and expensive rules.

CHEERS