Blockchain & Smart Contracts European Law Institute

Blockchains are technologies for storing and transmitting data, allowing the constitution of replicated and distributed ledgers, without a central monitoring body, secured by cryptography, and structured by blocks linked to each other, at regular intervals of time. Smart contracts are auto enforceable code, running on top of a blockchain.

The project aims at providing policymakers, legislators, but also legal practitioners with a legislative guide, a toolbox, on how to approach questions in the emerging legal field of blockchain and smart contracts.

Blockchain Perspectives Joint Research Initiative

This cross-disciplinary research initiative ambitions to study the various potential applications for blockchains across the economy, and in particular how distributed ledger technology (DLT) is likely to impact the financial industry.

To this end, important questions such as how DLT may be integrated into the post-trade landscape and reshape it, or how smart contracts can be used for managing margin requirements will be studied, with the overall ambition of precisely assessing the efficiency gain and risk reduction that market participants could expect from DLT introduction.

P2Pvalue European Project

Commons-based peer production (CBPP) is a new and increasingly significant model of social innovation based on collaborative production by citizens through the Internet. This project will foster the CBPP phenomenon by providing a techno-social software platform specifically designed to facilitate the creation of resilient and sustainable CBPP communities. The design of the P2Pvalue platform will be empirically and experimentally grounded. Through a triangulation of qualitative and quantitative methods, we will elaborate guidelines for the institutional and technical features that favour value creation in CBPP.

The project focuses on three key areas of improvement over current platforms: (1) Enhancing community sustainability by adopting the governance, legal, economic, and technical infrastructures that favour value creation and resilience; (2) Supporting the contributors with systems of reward that allow value to flow back to the creators; (3) Integrating the functionalities of online social networking services and collaborative software in a privacy-aware platform based on a decentralised architecture.

ADAM Agence Nationale de la Recherche

This interdisciplinary project involves several research institutions in France, including the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), Telecom Paris-Tech and Écoles de Mines, to study the technical, political, social, socio-cultural and legal implications of distributed network architectures. This term indicates a type of network bearing several features: a network made of multiple computing units, capable to achieve its objective by sharing resources and tasks, able to tolerate the failure of individual nodes and thus not subjected to single points of failure, and able to scale flexibly. Beyond this simplified operational definition, the choice, by developers and engineers of Internet-based services, to develop these architectures instead of today’s widespread centralized models, has several implications for the daily use of online services and for the rights of Internet users.