Global Regulatory Coordination Strategies
Panel 4, chaired by Professor Rosa Giovanna Barresi, closed the second day by lifting the discussion to the global level: how should regulators coordinate across borders in a world where stablecoins are moving beyond payments into corporate debt — and are national regulators, as the chair provocatively asked, doomed to disappear like national airlines? Professor Ross Buckley opened with a governance lesson drawn from AI adoption: institutions deploy technology first and think about governing it second, when the two must proceed in parallel — and cross-border arrangements demand an upfront choice between platform-wide and transaction-based governance. Professor Shuji Kobayakawa mapped the quiet momentum behind wholesale CBDCs across Asia, from Indonesia's Project Garuda to Project Nexus, and drew a sharp line between deposit tokens, anchored in the soundness of bank balance sheets, and stablecoins, whose reserve treatment varies markedly across jurisdictions. Professor Poonam Puri told the Canadian story: the Quadriga collapse as catalyst, and a federated system of thirteen securities regulators that nonetheless delivered a swift, coordinated response through existing securities law.
Professor Teresa Rodríguez de las Heras Ballell brought the debate down to its legal foundations, presenting the notion of controllable electronic records and arguing that questions of sale, pledge and enforcement of digital assets cannot be answered until private law itself is equipped for them. Professor Deepankar Roy traced India's regulatory arc — from the 2018 banking ban through its reversal by the Supreme Court to today's taxation and AML framework — alongside the e-rupee's expanding use cases, from programmable payments to farmers to cross-border experiments with the UAE. Dr Jürgen Schaaf concluded with the distributional consequences of a Bitcoin that "rises forever", from a paper co-authored with the ECB's Director General for Market Infrastructure and Payments: even under the rosiest scenario, early holders retain wealth that latecomers can never recover — redistribution without wealth creation.
“Companies started using AI heavily before even thinking about how they were going to govern it — a governance gap. For some reason, human beings think you do it first and govern it second. But you really need to do it in parallel, not in sequence.”
“The Quadriga crisis exposed serious gaps in Canada’s regulatory framework, but it also galvanised our securities regulators towards action. Our policy changes usually take years — in this case, the federated structure was not an impediment.”
“In 2018 the Reserve Bank of India prevented banks from servicing cryptocurrency exchanges; in 2020 the Supreme Court restored the legality of cryptocurrency trading — but still, regulatory ambiguity remains.”
“The soundness of banks’ balance sheets as a whole is the underpinning of the stability of deposit tokens — which, one way or another, has to be differentiated from the way stablecoins maintain their stability.”
“To what extent can we sell digital assets, pledge digital assets, enforce against digital assets?
All these questions cannot be answered unless we solve the challenges at the private law level.”
“Even with convergence, the early birds retain more wealth and real assets, and the consumption gaps persist. The redistribution continues even if holdings are equalised. It is about wealth transfer — and there is no wealth creation.”