"A Practical Guide to Web3, Blockchain, and Smart Contract Law is an essential handbook for lawyers, accountants, academics, business people, and others operating in the Blockchain space. This third edition of one of the first Blockchain law textbooks in the world effectively shines a light on what people perceive to be a “gray area” in the law by addressing a broad range of topics, including securities, tax, business structuring, proceeds of crime and anti-money laundering, smart contracts, estate issues, and much more. Each chapter of the book is written by a professional at the forefront of the world’s legal, accounting, and academic Blockchain community. The analysis of this evolving area of law is thus approached through an interdisciplinary lens that provides a practical and holistic view of how emerging advances in Web3, Blockchain, and Metaverse law interact within new and existing legal frameworks."--

"This book is a comprehensive text addressing tax, securities, regulatory and other issues that are essential to practicing in this multidisciplinary space. It surveys legal issues related to blockchain, distributed ledger technology and smart contracts, which is an interdisciplinary area of law requiring expertise in tax, securities, anti-money laundering and FINTRAC regulations, class actions, estate planning, commercial transactions and others. "--

Develop, validate, and deploy powerful decentralized applications using blockchain Get the most out of cutting-edge blockchain technology using the hands-on information contained in this comprehensive resource. Written by a team of technology and legal experts, Blockchain: A Practical Guide to Developing Business, Law, and Technology Solutions demonstrates each topic through a start-to-finish, illustrated case study. The book includes financial, technology, governance, and legal use cases along with advantages and challenges. Validation, implementation, troubleshooting, and best practices are fully covered. You will learn, step-by-step, how to build and maintain effective, reliable, and transparent blockchain solutions.•Understand the fundamentals of decentralized computing and blockchain•Explore business, technology, governance, and legal use cases•Review the evolving practice of law and technology as it concerns legal and governance issues arising from blockchain implementation•Write and administer performant blockchain-enabled applications•Handle cryptographic validation in private, public, and consortium blockchains•Employ blockchain in cloud deployments and Internet of Things (IoT) devices•Incorporate Web 3.0 features with Swarm, IPFS, Storj, Golem, and WHISPER•Use Solidity to build and validate fully functional distributed applications and smart contracts using Ethereum•See how blockchain is used in crypto-currency, including Bitcoin and Ethereum•Overcome technical hurdles and secure your decentralized IT platform

Blockchain and Smart Contract Law: U.S. and International Perspectives is a practical guide for lawyers, accountants, entrepreneurs, and businesses in the technology sector who need to understand the legal and regulatory landscape of digital assets and Blockchain-related technologies. The publication addresses the current state of the law and new interpretations by regulators in response to ongoing innovations that continue to raise novel legal issues and make the enforcement of laws and regulations increasingly difficult. The book examines U.S., Canada, offshore, and international jurisdictions that have become influential in the regulation of digital assets and Blockchain-related technologies. Blockchain and Smart Contract Law: U.S. and International Perspectives provides a unique analysis of the impact of financial technologies on multiple legal disciplines, including securities law considerations, tax treatment of digital assets, business structuring, anti-money laundering, smart contracts, intellectual property, and estate planning. -- from publisher website.

Blockchain has become attractive to companies and governments because it promises to solve the age-old problem of mutability in transactions - that is, it makes falsification and recalculation impossible once a transaction has been committed to the technology. However, the perceived complexity of implementing Blockchain calls for an in-depth overview of its key features and functionalities, specifically in a legal context. The systematic and comprehensive approach set forth in this indispensable book, including coverage of existing relevant law in various jurisdictions and practical guidance on how to tackle legal issues raised by the use of Blockchain, ensures a one-stop-shop reference book for anyone considering Blockchain-based solutions or rendering advice with respect to them. Within a clear structure by fields of law allowing for a systematic approach, each contributor - all of them are practitioners experienced with Blockchain projects within their respective areas of expertise - elucidates the implications of Blockchain technology and related legal issues under such headings as the following: technical explanation of Blockchain technology; contract law; regulatory issues and existing regulation in a variety of jurisdictions; data protection and privacy; capital markets; information security; patents and other intellectual property considerations; and antitrust law. Keeping the legal questions and concepts sufficiently generic so that lawyers can benefit from the handbook irrespective of their jurisdiction and legal background, the authors cover such specific characteristics of Blockchain implementation as so-called smart contracts, tokenization, distributed ledger technology, digital securities, recognition of code as law, data privacy challenges and Blockchain joint ventures. Because Blockchain is a relatively new technology still in process and raises a multitude of legal questions, this well-balanced introduction - at a depth that allows non-IT experts to understand the groundwork for legal assessments - provides a solid basis for organizations and their legal advisors in identifying and resolving Blockchain-related issues. Legal practitioners, in-house lawyers, IT professionals and advisors, consultancy firms, Blockchain associations and legal scholars will welcome this highly informative and practical book.

The product of a unique collaboration between academic scholars, legal practitioners, and technology experts, this Handbook is the first of its kind to analyze the ongoing evolution of smart contracts, based upon blockchain technology, from the perspective of existing legal frameworks - namely, contract law. The book's coverage ranges across many areas of smart contracts and electronic or digital platforms to illuminate the impact of new, and often disruptive, technologies on the law. With a mix of scholarly commentary and practical application, chapter authors provide expert insights on the core issues involving the use of smart contracts, concluding that smart contracts cannot supplant contract law and the courts, but leaving open the question of whether there is a need for specialized regulations to prevent abuse. This book should be read by anyone interested in the disruptive effect of new technologies on the law generally, and contract law in particular.

There is a broad consensus amongst law firms and in-house legal departments that next generation “Legal Tech” – particularly in the form of Blockchain-based technologies and Smart Contracts – will have a profound impact on the future operations of all legal service providers. Legal Tech startups are already revolutionizing the legal industry by increasing the speed and efficiency of traditional legal services or replacing them altogether with new technologies. This on-going process of disruption within the legal profession offers significant opportunities for all business. However, it also poses a number of challenges for practitioners, trade associations, technology vendors, and regulators who often struggle to keep up with the technologies, resulting in a widening regulatory “gap.” Many uncertainties remain regarding the scope, direction, and effects of these new technologies and their integration with existing practices and legacy systems. Adding to the challenges is the growing need for easy-to-use contracting solutions, on the one hand, and for protecting the users of such solutions, on the other. To respond to the challenges and to provide better legal communications, systems, and services Legal Tech scholars and practitioners have found allies in the emerging field of Legal Design. This collection brings together leading scholars and practitioners working on these issues from diverse jurisdictions. The aim is to introduce Blockchain and Smart Contract technologies, and to examine their on-going impact on the legal profession, business and regulators.

Keeping up with fast evolving technology is a challenge that every business leader faces. As organisations start to wake up to the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it’s becoming more important than ever to be able to utilise and exploit new digital platforms. With the simple aim of demystifying blockchain for business leaders, The Executive Guide to Blockchain offers a jargon-free explanation and framework to better understand blockchain technologies and their impact on organizations. Enabling any business leader with or without specific computing knowledge to reap the benefits of blockchain whilst understanding the limitations, this book will empower you to: Identify opportunities for blockchain in your own business sectors Understand smart contracts and their relationship with the law Create a blockchain strategy and business case Implement blockchain technologies and maximise their potential. Written by experts in non-technical language, this practical resource can be applied to any industry, and arm you with the knowledge needed to capture the possibilities of digital business.

“Blockchains will matter crucially; this book, beautifully and clearly written for a wide audience, powerfully demonstrates how.” —Lawrence Lessig “Attempts to do for blockchain what the likes of Lawrence Lessig and Tim Wu did for the Internet and cyberspace—explain how a new technology will upend the current legal and social order... Blockchain and the Law is not just a theoretical guide. It’s also a moral one.” —Fortune Bitcoin has been hailed as an Internet marvel and decried as the preferred transaction vehicle for criminals. It has left nearly everyone without a computer science degree confused: how do you “mine” money from ones and zeros? The answer lies in a technology called blockchain. A general-purpose tool for creating secure, decentralized, peer-to-peer applications, blockchain technology has been compared to the Internet in both form and impact. Blockchains are being used to create “smart contracts,” to expedite payments, to make financial instruments, to organize the exchange of data and information, and to facilitate interactions between humans and machines. But by cutting out the middlemen, they run the risk of undermining governmental authorities’ ability to supervise activities in banking, commerce, and the law. As this essential book makes clear, the technology cannot be harnessed productively without new rules and new approaches to legal thinking. “If you...don’t ‘get’ crypto, this is the book-length treatment for you.” —Tyler Cowen, Marginal Revolution “De Filippi and Wright stress that because blockchain is essentially autonomous, it is inflexible, which leaves it vulnerable, once it has been set in motion, to the sort of unforeseen consequences that laws and regulations are best able to address.” —James Ryerson, New York Times Book Review