This chapter analyses the meaning, legal implications, and policy consequences of Decentralised Finance (‘DeFi’). Decentralisation has the potential to undermine traditional forms of accountability and erode the effectiveness of traditional financial regulation and enforcement. At the same time, where parts of financial services are decentralised, there will be a reconcentration in a different (but possibly less regulated, less visible, and less transparent) part of the financial services chain. DeFi regulation could and should focus on this reconcentrated portion to ensure effective oversight and risk control. In fact, DeFi requires regulation in order to achieve its core objective of decentralisation. Furthermore, DeFi may further the idea of ‘embedded regulation’– building regulatory approaches into the design of decentralised infrastructure, potentially decentralising both finance and its regulation in the ultimate expression of RegTech.

Cryptocurrencies are reshaping money and payment systems in unprecedented ways. Catalysts include the launch of Bitcoin in 2009, the evolution of decentralised and centralised technologies, the announcement of Libra in 2019, the ongoing live trials of China’s Digital Yuan, and the COVID-19 pandemic and the related move to presenceless payments.This chapter considers the policy issues and choices associated with cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies (‘CBDCs’) and emphasises that there is no single model for CBDC design. The catalysts reshaping monetary and payment systems challenge regulators. While Bitcoin and its thousands of progenies could be ignored safely by regulators, Facebook’s proposal for Libra, a global stablecoin (‘GSC’), brought an immediate and potent response from regulators globally. This proposal by the private sector to move into the traditional preserve of sovereigns– the creation of currency– was always likely both to trigger such a regulatory response and the development of CBDCs by central banks. China has moved first with its e-CNY– an initiative that may, in time, provoke a chain of CBDC issuance around the globe.

In its 2020 survey, the Edelman Trust Barometer identified a paradox: ‘despite a strong global economy and near full employment, none of the four societal institutions that the study measures – government, business, NGOs and media – is trusted’.1 This is a rather grim sounding paradox. One can try to resolve it in a variety of ways. An obvious way would be to argue that when we measure trust, we are measuring a rather uninformative quantity. After all, trust can be considered good and a loss of trust would accordingly be bad only if and insofar as trust is placed in something or someone actually worthy of our trust. So, the true problem, one could argue, is not the loss of trust but the loss of trustworthiness – and this has not been measured.2 Whether trust is a good proxy for trustworthiness has yet to be established.