Opening Remarks
Speakers: Shin'ichiro Matsuo
Date: February 18, 2020
Transcript By: Bryan Bishop
Tags: Research
Category: Workshop
Opening remarks
http://bsafe.network/events/codefi_stanford_2020/
https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/coordination-of-decentralized-finance-workshop/2020-stanford/
https://twitter.com/kanzure/status/1229833591716102144
Good morning. Let us start this workshop. I am a researcher at Georgetown University and it is my pleasure to host this workshop. CoDeFi is a workshop about coordination of decentralized finance. This unfortunately shares a name with a Consensys product. CoDeFi contains CoDe and DeFi. This is a multi-stakeholder workshop to discuss stakeholders that have never met before. I think we have regulators here, and engineers here, and researchers here, and business people here. There are many consortiums in the blockchain world, but most of them do not have the participation of engineers. This is a historical moment to get all stakeholders in one place.
This figure in this slide shows a few of the different stakeholders. We have regulators, open-source style engineers, business stakeholders, and consumers. The consumers are primarily interacting through the businesses, and the businesses interact with regulators and open-source engineers. Regulators have few connections to open-source engineers or the cypherpunks. It’s very hard to regulate open-source software at this time. The business entities would like to start businesses before mastering technology, and they would like to avoid friction with regulators. Consumers need transparency with business, based on the blockchain. As you remember, most ICO projects have 2-3 page whitepaper so that it looks useful to consumers. It’s important to have transparency of the business.
This is a background for why he are holding the CoDeFi workshop. Last year, Japan was the host country for G20 on June 8-9th, 2019 in Fukuoaka. On June 6th, 2019 there was a report by the Financial Stability Board (FSB). This report considered the impact of distributed ledger technologies and p2p on financial stability, regulation and governance implications. This report set out the benefits and risks of increased use of decentralized finance. This report underscored the importance of multi-stakeholder dialogue.
Here are two paragraphs of this effort.
After the G20 meeting, there was another meeting: a G20 high-level siminar on financial innovation “Our future in the digital age”. It was with Jun Marai, Klaas Knot, Adam Back, Shinichiro Matsuo, and Brad Carr. Jun Murai was an early internet pioneer and he was a moderator of the panel. Klaas Knot was a president of the Dutch national bank and provided a view of regulators. Adam Back is a cypherpunk and open-source engineer. I represented the perspective of academia and researchers.
This is a sentence from the comminique of G20: “We also welcome the FSB report on decentralized financial technologies, and the possible implications for financial stability, regulation and governance, and how regulators can enhance the dialogue with a wider group of stakeholders”. This is in the 13th paragraph of the report.
These workshops
After the G20 meeting, we had our first workshop in Vancouver and then we had one in Tokyo, Tel Aviv, London, Dublin, and we had one in Malaysia recently. Next will be Feb 26 in New York, and BG2C in Tokyo in March 9-10, and Washington in March 11, and then another one is scheduled too.
G20 meets G20 in Vancouver
There were 24 participants, including 3 regulators and 5 engineers. The topics included consumer protection and challenges of entrepreneurs to build businesses involving blockchain tech while facing uncertainty in regulations and banking.
Panel discussion at Fin/sum 2019
We had a good disucssion in Tokyo at Fin/sum 2019. This included Mai Santamaria, Allen Piscitello, Akhiko Yoshida, Shigeya Suzuki, and Shinichero Matsuo as moderator.
Decentralized Finance Architecture Workshop in Tel Aviv 2019
Scaling Bitcoin was going on at the same time as this workshop. Scaling Bitcoin is a conference for discussing development of bitcoin scaling technologies. This was handled in Tel Aviv. We had 54 participants attending this workshop, including regulators from Israel and the JFSA.
Transcripts: https://diyhpl.us/wiki/transcripts/bitcoinedge/decentralized-financial-architecture-workshop/
OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum (September 13, 2019)
We also had a policy forum.
Goals of CoDeFi Stanford 2020
We are reusing some of the slides from the Financial Crypto (FC) conference. Stanford has a good handle on research into cryptography, economics and blockchain. We have the benefit of Stanford here today. We would like to have a common understanding among different stakeholders. We would like to produce some output paper from these discussions. All stakeholders should be included, and it will be publsihed as a workshop proceeding (LNCS) as a workshop report. Papers of morning lectures should also be included.
Today’s program
The schedule is available on the website: http://bsafe.network/events/codefi_stanford_2020/
Between the presentations, we have an unconference style discussion to discuss about some of the topics we have just seen. We will choose the topics at the beginning of each unconference discussion. I am sure you know how unconference roundtables are organized. We will first pick a discussion topic, and then we elect a discussion leader for each topic and have a discussion. I think 40 minute discussion for each topic makes sense. The nwe come together as a group and share the discussion and its results to all workshop participants.
Enjoy the productive discussions today. Thank you!
See also
https://www.coindesk.com/bridging-the-gap-between-bitcoin-and-global-regulators
Unconference discussions
- Nature of systemic risk in decentralized systems
- 2020 Scaling cryptocurrency and regulatory challenges
- Common understandings on “Regulatory Goals”
- Risk and resilience in cryptocurrency financial systems
- Financial stability impacts of decentralized risk-taking, decision-making & record-keeping
- Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs)
- Interoperability with existing financial infrastructure, permissionless ledgers & CBDCs
- Standards: technical, regulatory
- Governance of protocols, implementations
- Security, standards, and regulation of cryptocurrency exchanges
- FATF: AML and privacy
- Synthetic Hegemonic Currencies (SHC)
- Corporate Coins & Consortiums: Libra Coin & Association, Binance Venus, Walmart, etc.
- Mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies & blockchain technologies
Proposed topics:
- Communicating with regulators
- Stress testing
These transcripts are sponsored by Blockchain Commons.
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