The latest report from the OECD’s Global Blockchain Policy Forum underlines the opportunities for blockchain to support cross-border economic activity, and the need for international cooperation to realise these benefits and mitigate risks to global governance. OECD’s Oliver Garrett-Jones unpacks what this means for governments and industry, and where international efforts are headed.
Institutional investors are increasingly participating in digital asset markets and this can pose investor risks at the micro-level while potentially creating channels of contagion between DeFi and traditional finance (TradFi). OECD’s Iota Nassr considers the multitude of potential risks involved in the growing crypto-asset and DeFi markets and the role policy makers can play to evaluate and address these risks.
Regulation and competition enforcement in digital markets are hot topics as regulators become increasingly concerned about the market power and growing influence of large digital platforms. Philip Marsden shares his thoughts on how best to deal with anticompetitive conduct and transactions in digital markets and the role the OECD can play in designing effective rules and enforcement initiatives.
Decentralised Finance or ‘DeFi’ is the latest development in the crypto-asset space, and claims the potential to replicate the traditional financial system in an open, decentralised, permissionless and autonomous way, through applications built on the blockchain. Given the rapid growth of DeFi and commensurate risks, OECD’s Iota Nassr highlights why policy makers need to monitor this market closely and eventually take action to mitigate emerging risks.
Digital technologies and data – including Artificial Intelligence (AI) – hold the potential to automate and thus improve the efficiency and effectiveness of regulatory, supervisory and enforcement activities, which have become increasingly complex in recent years. Looking at the most common uses of supervisory technology (SupTech) by competition authorities, securities regulators and anti-corruption agencies to date, the OECD’s Emeline Denis identifies associated benefits, risks and challenges, and outlines considerations for devising adequate SupTech strategies across policy areas
The deployment of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the financial sector is bringing both benefits and new or amplified risks. While supporting AI-driven innovation in finance, the OECD’s Iota Nassr looks at some of these risks and the different tools policy makers can use to address them.
Digital platforms may absorb competitors through envelopment acquisitions, to build ecosystems. Daniele Condorelli discusses how some recent envelopment attacks may result from the desire to acquire valuable sources of data rather than products to maintain a position of market power.
In this interview by Matthieu Saint-Olive from ConsenSys, Jean-Michel Godeffroy, Director General for 16 years at the European Central Bank, shares his vision for central bank digital currencies
Competition in the digital economy is increasingly a competition between ecosystems. Hardware and software are integrated, Internet of Things devices connect to online services and a few large tech companies offer a very broad range of services often highly integrated with one another. OECD’s Harry Hong sets the scene for the discussions at the 2021 OECD Competition Open Day.
Cristina Caffarra argues that concerns about the impact on potential future competition of mergers between acquisitive platforms and small players are broader than ‘killer acquisitions’; they include ‘reverse killer acquisitions’ as well, in advance of the 2021 OECD Competition Open Day.
On the level 