This article examines the legal and regulatory challenges faced by platforms facilitating the primary issuance of tokenized equity in the European Union. Adopting an intermediary-centric perspective, it analyses how platform-based issuance models interact with existing EU financial law frameworks. The article argues that the regulatory classification of issuance platforms is determined primarily by the functional substance of platform activity rather than by the technological features of tokenization, rendering regulatory structuring a strategic design choice with significant compliance implications. It further demonstrates that, while EU law provides a formally comprehensive regulatory framework, persistent uncertainties remain concerning prospectus liability, the interaction with national company law, AML/CTF obligations, and cross-border operations. These doctrinal findings are supported by a quantitative analysis of security token issuance platforms, revealing market concentration, declining platform formation, and limited uptake of innovation-oriented regimes. The article also identifies factors enabling scalable, pan-European platform-mediated equity token issuance.
Encryption is a key building block of digital society protecting the security of the online environment and enabling a meaningful exercise of civil liberties. This technology endows its users with power that does not always sit well with law enforcement and intelligence authorities, which accordingly lose their control over information exchanges within society. The arguments, albeit yet to be substantiated, that this dynamic significantly impacts the fight against crime or other threats have triggered decades-long 'crypto-wars' that endure to this day. These crypto-tensions are compounded by the reality that at present no technological solutions are known that could grant security agencies a so-called 'exceptional access' to communications and data without compromising cybersecurity and fundamental rights. This paper comprehensively explores encryption policy in the EU and how these debates have been playing out in the face of the quantum threat that requires mitigation with new methods of encryption.
The adoption of the Global Digital Compact (GDC) by the United Nations General Assembly in 2024 raises a fundamental question: what do its human rights objectives mean in practice? This article addresses that question through a doctrinal analysis of the GDC's third objective and comparing it against international standards developed at the UN level and regional and national legislation, specifically the EU's Digital Services Act (DSA) and the UK's Online Safety Act (OSA). The article challenges claims of 'technological exceptionalism', which hold that digital technologies require entirely new legal frameworks, and argues instead that regulatory practice at the international, regional and national level consistently applies existing human rights instruments to the digital sphere rather than replacing them. Three areas are examined: human rights due diligence for digital companies, digital trust and safety with respect to women's and children's rights, and information integrity. The analysis of regulations for the digital sector show that the preference of regulators is to create new duties for private actors rather than new rights. The article concludes that the GDC should consolidate, rather than reinvent, international human rights law and that the existing practice of states and regional organisations points in that direction.
This article examines whether the fiduciary architecture of charity law in England and Wales can accommodate decentralised autonomous organisations (DAOs). Although DAOs promise transparency, participation and coordination through blockchain-based governance, which should appeal to charities, uptake within the sector remains limited. The article argues that this reflects a structural incompatibility between decentralised governance and the fiduciary framework through which charity law allocates responsibility. Charity law requires identifiable trustees who bear duties of loyalty, no-conflict, and no-profit and who remain subject to regulatory supervision. DAO governance, by contrast, disperses authority among token holders, relies on automated execution through smart contracts and often operates without legal personality. This mismatch produces what the article describes as a 'fiduciary bottleneck', in which decentralised decisions must ultimately pass through identifiable fiduciaries to acquire legal effect. The analysis conceptualises this tension as regulatory disconnect and considers its implications for integration of decentralised governance within regulatory regimes.
Freedom of expression online is increasingly shaped by intermediary-based regulatory models that profoundly affect end users, yet judicial scrutiny increasingly focuses on intermediaries rather than those whose speech is ultimately restricted. This article develops a complex model-sensitive analytical framework for assessing the intrusiveness of online speech regulation. Building on five criteria of intrusiveness—timing of interference, universal and indiscriminate monitoring, characteristics of the competent authority, risk of collateral damage, and severity of sanctions—the article compares six regulatory models operating in the European legal space. It then analyses the case law of the ECtHR and the CJEU to identify the safeguards and anti-safeguards applied to these models. The analysis reveals a disproportionality between structural intrusiveness and the level of judicial protection afforded both within and across regulatory models. Also, three of the aforementioned criteria were neglected by the courts and the perspective of end users increasingly underemphasised.
