Blockchain Consultants

Blockchain Transformations Done Here

Netherlands

Cointelegraph Consulting: Research outlines how DeFi can merge with traditional finance

by

Whilst public adoption of crypto assets is increasing, the global regulations continue to progress and recognise decentralized technologies as a suitable infrastructure for the dematerialisation of securities. In Luxembourg, the country that is second in the world in terms of assets under management, the country’s regulator adopted a bill that explicitly recognised the possibility of using distributed ledger technology for the dematerialisation of securities. 

The regulation is moving quickly elsewhere across Europe: Tokenized securities now fall under the same rules and regulations as traditional financial instruments in many other European countries including France, Switzerland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Romania, Spain and the UK.

Read the ebook to discover how you can be part of this emerging digital asset industry. Download the full report here.

What next for the industry? Due to the increase in public adoption and the favourable regulatory environment, demand from the financial industry to access digital networks is on the rise. So far, banks have digitized the retail industry but not much has evolved in capital markets.

The digitization of this industry is now possible through the blockchain, an infrastructure now widely recognized by the largest governments globally for financial instruments. Funds and asset managers can now upgrade their distribution channels by launching Digital Asset Marketplace (DAM) and connecting to others via decentralized networks.

DAMs will help their customers discover new opportunities, manage their investments and even open secondary market possibilities. In this ebook, industry participants explain how capital market players can benefit from blockchain by launching a DAM and maximizing the monetization of their investor base.

Financial institutions are beginning to publicly embrace and adopt the technology. So far they have started, as expected, with crypto-assets. Once they begin to trust the technology and it becomes embedded within their portfolios, it will mean one thing: curiosity will peak and these institutions will realise the operational benefits of decentralized technology.

Driven by increased confidence in the technology, and pressured by DeFi replacing many traditional banking functions, institutions will begin to learn that the technology can solve long-standing and deeply entrenched industry problems, particularly in the opaque and highly illiquid private markets.

Digital Asset Marketplaces, i.e. primary and secondary venues where investors meet, will be the driver for this according to the study. However, open source standards like the Token for Regulated EXchanges (T-REX), are required to enforce compliance onchain in a heavily regulated world.

Cointelegraph Consulting: Research outlines how DeFi can merge with traditional finance

Source

Bitcoin Held A Market Cap Of $900 Billion For A Short While

by

Bitcoin is seeing its market cap loom ever closer to the fabled trillion-dollar mark. Today, the world’s first cryptocurrency saw its market cap rise past the $900 billion mark for a short moment as the asset hit new record highs in price.

Bitstamp Recording $900 Billion Market Cap

Bitstamp stands as one of the oldest crypto exchanges operating still. Recently, this exchange reported a price peak at $49,000, which resulted in Bitcoin holding a market cap of $912.69 billion. As it stands now, however, Bitcoin has seemingly returned to the $47,600 range.

Should Bitcoin gain (and maintain) a market cap of over $900 billion, it means that the asset managed to gain $354 billion in value just within this year, and it isn’t even March yet. Bitcoin’s price action certainly seems to want to achieve this, looming ever closer to that $49,000 price tag.

BitStamp to Operate Legally in New York with New BitLicense
Source: Chepicap.com

Bitcoin Outperforms The Netherlands

As it stands now, Bitcoin is responsible for approximately 61% of the entire crypto space’s market cap. These market caps have also reached all-time highs, with all the major altcoins going up alongside Bitcoin. The current market cap now stands at $1.450 trillion at the time of writing. The asset started this year with a market cap of just $776 billion.

CompaniesMarketCap, which isn’t CoinMarketCap, stands as a website ranking the most traded assets in the world, rating them by market cap. As it stands now, Bitcoin is in ninth place, managing to surpass Tesla and Facebook last week. Bitcoin’s market cap can even be compared to countries, as its $900 billion market cap makes it stand between the Netherlands and Mexico ($886 billion and $1.04 trillion, respectively) in terms of GDP.

Let that sink in. Bitcoin is outperforming entire countries.

Potential For BTC Only Growing

These new highs for Bitcoin came on the very same day the first-ever US Bitcoin ETF was approved. This also comes within the same week Tesla opted to buy a whopping $1.5 billion in Bitcoin, as well as a far more crypto-friendly regulatory atmosphere, at least when it comes to crypto-related fintech projects.

Even the US’s Biden Administration, having done some strange things throughout its time in power, had also made the wise move by appointing various individuals in high positions that hold crypto-friendly sentiments. This could be a signal for greater cooperation opportunities between blockchain-based enterprises and regulatory authorities. Or it could just be a coincidence, though that’s unlikely.

Bitcoin Held A Market Cap Of $900 Billion For A Short While

Source

Dutch court orders Facebook to ban celebrity crypto scam ads after another lawsuit

by

A Dutch court has ruled that Facebook can be required to use filter technologies to identify and pre-emptively take down fake ads linked to crypto currency scams that carry the image of a media personality, John de Mol, and other well known celebrities.

The Dutch celerity filed a lawsuit against Facebook in April over the misappropriation of his and other celebrities’ likeness to shill Bitcoin scams via fake ads run on its platform.

In an immediately enforceable preliminary judgement today the court has ordered Facebook to remove all offending ads within five days, and provide data on the accounts running them within a week.

Per the judgement, victims of the crypto scams had reported a total of €1.7 million (~$1.8M) in damages to the Dutch government at the time of the court summons.

The case is similar to a legal action instigated by UK consumer advice personality, Martin Lewis, last year, when he announced defamation proceedings against Facebook — also for misuse of his image in fake ads for crypto scams. Lewis withdrew the suit at the start of this year after Facebook agreed to apply new measures to tackle the problem: Namely a scam ads report button. It also agreed to provide funding to a UK consumer advice organization to set up a scam advice service.

In the de Mol case the lawsuit was allowed to run its course — resulting in today’s preliminary judgement against Facebook.

It’s not yet clear whether the company will appeal but in the wake of the ruling Facebook has said it will bring the scam ads report button to the Dutch market early next month.

In court, the platform giant sought to argue that it could not more proactively remove the Bitcoin scam ads containing celebrities’ images on the grounds that doing so would breach EU law against general monitoring conditions being placed on Internet platforms.

However the court rejected that argument, citing a recent ruling by Europe’s top court related to platform obligations to remove hate speech, also concluding that the specificity of the requested measures could not be classified as ‘general obligations of supervision’.

It also rejected arguments by Facebook’s lawyers that restricting the fake scam ads would be restricting the freedom of expression of a natural person, or the right to be freely informed — pointing out that the ‘expressions’ involved are aimed at commercial gain, as well as including fraudulent practices.

Facebook also sought to argue it is already doing all it can to identify and take down the fake scam ads — saying too that its screening processes are not perfect. But the court said there’s no requirement for 100% effectiveness for additional proactive measures to be ordered.

Its ruling further notes a striking reduction in fake scam ads using de Mol’s image since the lawsuit was announced. 

Facebook’s argument that it’s just a neutral platform was also rejected, with the court pointing out that its core business is advertising. It also took the view that requiring Facebook to apply technically complicated measures and extra effort, including in terms of manpower and costs, to more effectively remove offending scam ads is not unreasonable in this context.

The judgement orders Facebook to remove fake scam ads containing celebrity likenesses from Facebook and Instagram within five days of the order — with a penalty of €10k per day that Facebook fails to comply with the order, up to a maximum of €1M (~$1.1M).

The court order also requires that Facebook provides data to the affected celebrity on the accounts that had been misusing their likeness within seven days of the judgement, with a further penalty of €1k per day for failure to comply, up to a maximum of €100k.

Facebook has also been ordered to pay the case costs.

Responding to the judgement in a statement, a Facebook spokesperson told us:

We have just received the ruling and will now look at its implications. We will consider all legal actions, including appeal. Importantly, this ruling does not change our commitment to fighting these types of ads. We cannot stress enough that these types of ads have absolutely no place on Facebook and we remove them when we find them. We take this very seriously and will therefore make our scam ads reporting form available in the Netherlands in early December. This is an additional way to get feedback from people, which in turn helps train our machine learning models. It is in our interest to protect our users from fraudsters and when we find violators we will take action to stop their activity, up to and including taking legal action against them in court.

One legal expert describes the judgement as “pivotal“. Law professor Mireille Hildebrandt told us that it provides for as an alternative legal route for Facebook users to litigate and pursue collective enforcement of European personal data rights. Rather than suing for damages — which entails a high burden of proof.

Injunctions are faster and more effective, Hildebrandt added.

“It clearly demonstrates that Facebook is an advertising platform that can be held liable under Dutch tort law for not taking adequate measure to remove fake ads, provided certain conditions apply (such as that the request for an injunction is sufficiently specific),” she said. “It also clearly demonstrates that filing an injunction to stop unlawful behaviour based on tort law can be very efficient, without having to prove damages, because the injunction can be enforced by way of penalty payments for each day that it is not complied with.”

“I believe that this is the kind of action Member State should enable under art. 79 GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation] in the case of unlawful processing of personal data,” Hildebrandt added.

“Art. 80 GDPR allows data subjects to mandate their right to file such an injunction to a dedicated NGO (thus enabling collective action). This is not the case for a tort actions suing for damages, in that case the GDPR leaves it up to the Member States whether or not to allow such mandating. On top of that suing for damages is very cumbersome in the case of unlawful processing, because it is usually very difficult to prove damages and to prove causality.”

The judgement also raises questions around the burden of proof for demonstrating Facebook has removed scam ads with sufficient (increased) accuracy; and what specific additional measures it might deploy to improve its takedown rate.

Although the introduction of the ‘report scam ad button’ does provide one clear avenue for measuring takedown performance.

The button was finally rolled out to the UK market in July. And while Facebook has talked since the start of this year about ‘envisaging’ introducing it in other markets it hasn’t exactly been proactive in doing so — up til now, with this court order. 

This report was updated with additional comment 

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/12/dutch-court-orders-facebook-to-ban-celebrity-crypto-scam-ads-after-another-lawsuit/

GDPR adtech complaints keep stacking up in Europe

by

It’s a year since Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force and leaky adtech is now facing privacy complaints in four more European Union markets. This ups the tally to seven markets where data protection authorities have been urged to investigate a core function of behavioral advertising.

The latest clutch of GDPR complaints aimed at the real-time bidding (RTB) system have been filed in Belgium, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and Spain.

All the complaints argue that RTB entails “wide-scale and systemic” breaches of Europe’s data protection regime, as personal date harvested to profile Internet users for ad-targeting purposes is broadcast widely to bidders in the adtech chain. The complaints have implications for key adtech players, Google and the Internet Advertising Bureau, which set RTB standards used by other in the online adverting pipeline.

We’ve reached out to Google and IAB Europe for comment on the latest complaints. (The latter’s original response statement to the complaint can be found here, behind its cookie wall.)

The first RTB complaints were filed in the UK and Ireland, last fall, by Dr Johnny Ryan of private browser Brave; Jim Killock, director of the Open Rights Group; and Michael Veale, a data and policy researcher at University College London.

A third complaint went in to Poland’s DPA in January, filed by anti-surveillance NGO, the Panoptykon Foundation.

The latest four complaints have been lodged in Spain by Gemma Galdon Clavell (Eticas Foundation) and Diego Fanjul (Finch); David Korteweg (Bits of Freedom) in the Netherlands; Jef Ausloos (University of Amsterdam) and Pierre Dewitte (University of Leuven) in Belgium; and Jose Belo (Exigo Luxembourg).

Earlier this year a lawyer working with the complainants said they’re expecting “a cascade of complaints” across Europe — and “fully expect an EU-wide regulatory response” give that the adtech in question is applied region-wide.

Commenting in a statement, Galdon Cavell, the CEO of Eticas, said: “We hope that this complaint sends a strong message to Google and those using Ad Tech solutions in their websites and products. Data protection is a legal requirement must be translated into practices and technical specifications.”

A ‘bug’ disclosed last week by Twitter illustrates the potential privacy risks around adtech, with the social networking platform revealing it had inadvertently shared some iOS users’ location data with an ad partner during the RTB process. (Less clear is who else might Twitter’s “trusted advertising partner” have passed people’s information to?)

The core argument underpinning the complaints is that RTB’s data processing is not secure — given the design of the system entails the broadcasting of (what can be sensitive and intimate) personal data of Internet users to all sorts of third parties in order to generate bids for ad space.

Whereas GDPR bakes in a requirement for personal data to be processed “in a manner that ensures appropriate security of the personal data”. So, uh, spot the disconnect.

The latest RTB complaints assert personal data is broadcast via bid requests “hundreds of billions of times” per day — which it describes as “the most massive leakage of personal data recorded so far”.

While the complaints focus on security risks attached by default to leaky adtech, such a long chain of third parties being passed people’s data also raises plenty of questions over the validity of any claimed ‘consents’ for passing Internet users’ data down the adtech chain. (Related: A decision by the French CNIL last fall against a small local adtech player which it decided was unlawfully processing personal data obtained via RTB.)

This week will mark a year since GDPR came into force across the EU. And it’s fair to say that privacy complaints have been piling up, while enforcement actions — such as a $57M fine for Google from the French CNIL related to Android consent — remain far rarer.

One complexity with the RTB complaints is that the technology systems in question are both applied across EU borders and involve multiple entities (Google and the IAB). This means multiple privacy watchdogs need to work together to determine which of them is legally competent to address linked complaints that touch EU citizens in multiple countries.

Who leads can depend on where an entity has its main establishment in the EU and/or who is the data controller. If this is not clearly established it’s possible that various national actions could flow from the complaints, given the cross-border nature of the adtech — as in the CNIL decision against Android, for example. (Though Google made a policy change as of January 22, shifting its legal base for EU law enforcement to Google Ireland which looks intended to funnel all GDPR risk via the Irish DPC.)

The IAB Europe, meanwhile, has an office in Belgium but it’s not clear whether that’s the data controller in this case. Ausloos tells us that the Belgian DPA has already declared itself competent regarding the complaint filed against the IAB by the Panoptykon Foundation, while noting another possibility — that the IAB claims the data controller is IAB Tech Lab, based in New York — “in which case any and all DPAs across the EU would be competent”.

Veale also says different DPAs could argue that different parts of the IAB are in their jurisdiction. “We don’t know how the IAB structure really works, it’s very opaque,” he tells us.

The Irish DPC, which Google has sought to designate the lead watchdog for its European business, has said it will prioritize scrutiny of the adtech sector in 2019, referencing the RTB complaints in its annual report earlier this year — where it warned the industry: “the protection of personal data is a prerequisite to the processing of any personal data within this ecosystem and ultimately the sector must comply with the standards set down by the GDPR”.

There’s no update on how the UK’s ICO is tackling the RTB complaint filed in the UK as yet — but Veale notes they have a call today. (And we’ve reached out to the ICO for comment.)

So far the same RTB complaints have not been filed in France and Germany — jurisdictions with privacy watchdogs that can have a reputation for some of the most muscular action enforcing data protection in Europe.

Although the Belgian DPA’s recently elected new president is making muscular noises about GDPR enforcement, according to Ausloos — who cites a speech he made, post-election, saying the ‘time of sit back and relax’ is over. They made sure to reference these comments in the RTB complaint, he adds.

Veale suggests the biggest blocker to resolving the RTB complaints is that all the various EU watchdogs “need a vision of what the world looks like after they take a given action”.

In the meanwhile, the adtech complaints keep stacking up.

Read more: https://techcrunch.com/2019/05/20/gdpr-adtech-complaints-keep-stacking-up-in-europe/