Our proposal is about delivering specific inputs to regulatory frameworks within the European Union during Q3 / 2022, utilising the great opportunities in areas, where the EU is interested in receiving commentary feedback from domain experts (Financial, Data Privacy, Competition Regulations). We can do this very effectively and efficiently by applying the continuously growing knowledge captured in our DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar. This way we are not starting from the scratch, but are systematically building upon the growing information from inside and outside the Cardano Community, from the continuously reviewed academic papers and from the knowledge of excellent domain experts within our network. DLT360 is a long-term-oriented project. All topics, also the regulatory and legal ones, are approached in an inter-disciplinary way.
<u>Please note: This proposal is part of a bigger picture</u>:
The basic setup of the DLT360 Risk & Opportunity Radar was funded in fund 6 and greatly supported by a number of projects in fund 7. Fund 8 will hopefully let us continue and finally get to the status of mature, subscription-based services. Our initial work of fund 6 will be completed by approximately end of Q1/2022 with a first 360-degree roundtrip-video and roundtrip-presentation.
<u>Why are we doing all this</u>? Cardano - similar to successful professional companies - needs to continuously investigate facts, trends, risks and opportunities. In commercial companies, this is typically done by independent risk-management entities reporting directly to the C-suite. With our services, we want to support Cardano in
- Making sure that the millions (billions) are wisely invested
- Enabling the future dREPs and Cardano governance-bodies in making data & fact based decisions
- Having major trends, risks and opportunities precisely analysed and visualised (collecting from a multitude of sources)
- Demonstrating this carefulness to regulatory bodies and professional clients (e.g. governments and corporations who rely on Cardano as public, permissionless blockchain)
- Benefitting form continuously updated interdisciplinary perspectives in a PESTELE format (Politics, Environment/Health, Social/Reputation, Technology, Ethics, Legal, Economy/Business/Application Portfolio).
We are currently presenting our activities in form of single projects, hoping to overcome this stage with fund 9. At the end of 2022, we want to be a subscription-based service, also available to outside-Cardano clients worldwide (like commercial companies), becoming economically successful and independent from the initial Catalyst startup funding. Please also check and support our proposal for future subscription-based funding (Proposed F9 Challenge Setting: <https://cardano.ideascale.com/c/idea/400085>).
How we address the challenge
Influencing regulations requires continuous efforts of an interdisciplinary team. DLT360 is progressing very well in setting up the required expert-network and infrastructure in a long-term-oriented way. We are also actively partnering up with other proposers for avoiding redundancies and for maximising benefits for the Cardano Community.
In a first step, due to our proximity to Brussels and senior partner’s available expertise, DLT360 will put emphasis on EU legislation - which is crucial for the global success of Cardano, due to the far reaching impact EU norms have world wide - from the areas of data privacy to financial regulation. The project works in two steps:
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<u>First</u>, DLT360’s Regulatory segment continuous building a body of research on upcoming legislation from the ground up in order to form a solid foundation for future lobbying efforts.
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<u>Second</u>, this research is put to use to strategically comment during consultation phases of the European Commission when they arise, which we are consistently monitoring.
As legislative efforts in the EU pertaining to blockchain technology gain traction, these consultations are an important opportunity for stakeholders to voice their concerns. In the past, such consultations were held for example on an upcoming EU regulatory framework for crypto-assets, as well as taxation measures for crypto-assets.
Our work is not a 'one-off' effort, but is part of our overall DLT360 Risk and Opportunity Management framework. This will also make sure that the outcome is properly visualised and accessible over our DLT360 RADAR and communicated during our quarterly DLT360 video reporting.
Lobbying for favourable legislation within the EU is all about putting the efforts into the right channels and about knowing the right people. We have parts of our team sitting in Brussels and are strategically increasing our expert-network. Main challenge we experience is, that we need to find ways to promote our interdisciplinary approach more actively, as we are currently either talking to very specialised lawyers or specialised technicians, easily getting stuck in 'silo-mode'. Our vision is here to get to a more 'joint experimental sandbox model', but this will require endurance and patience before getting there. High-quality written feedback is an important first step, and this we are well prepared to deliver.