Regulation of new digital currencies and new payment services will take time. But regulators should now outline the core elements of regulation so that private initiative can design its commercial projects without harming public interests.

A Brief Introduction to MiCA

The Digital Financial Package of the European Council is achieving its objectives. Having concerns to protect investors and financial stability, the Council finally reached an agreement on two regulations namely: The Regulation on Markets in Crypto Assets and The Digital Operational Resilience Act. The first one, MiCA, regulates crypto-assets and crypto-asset service providers in a comprehensive and balanced manner: While it proposes authorization requirements for the issuance of crypto-assets, and the crypto-asset service providers, certain cases are excluded from the scope in order to avoid unnecessary burdens. This article presents a brief outline of what MiCA Proposal (the Regulation or MiCA hereafter)¹ offers from a legal perspective.

Medium

“Programmable money” is, without doubt, one of the major buzzwords in the blockchain space in 2020. Even though everyone seems to talk about it, we still lack a clear definition and hence common understanding of this term. In this article, we present a taxonomy of programmable money. In particular, we argue that “programmable money” has to be differentiated from “programmable payments”. To make this distinction as clear as possible, we develop a framework in which we decompose the payments value chain into three pillars: the contract execution system, the digital payment infrastructure, and the monetary unit.