Blockchains And Antitrust Laws Have The Same Objective: Vitalik Buterin

The prominent crypto figure and co-founder of Ethereum, Vitalik Buterin, says that blockchain and antitrust laws have the same objective and same goal – which is to prevent the creation of monopolies by imposing decentralization.

A paper published recently by the co-founder of Ethereum in the ETH news, Vitalik Buterin, along with the Harvard faculty professor Thibault Schrepel argues that blockchain is now positioned to help antitrust laws in areas where the regulations are difficult to apply and enforce.

The paper is dubbed Blockchain Code as Antitrust, explains that the blockchains and antitrust laws can help the industries by increasing decentralization and preventing the creation of monopolies. However, as they said, blockchains can only do so if the regulations are there to support the technology.

“Law and technology should be thought of as allies – not enemies – as they feature complementary strengths and defects,” reads the paper.

Buterin was in the blockchain news with Schrepel as they explained that blockchain – with the help of smart contracts – can create trust in situations where laws are hard to implement, such as “when the jurisdictions are mutually unfriendly (cross-border issue) or when the state is not enforcing legal limitations on the exercise of power by its agents or private entities.”

Smart contracts help create an ecosystem where none of the transacting parties are subject to placing trust in an unknown person or entity without being assured that their transaction will be successfully completed.

Blockchains and antitrust laws, according to Buterin, can help a lot of industries. They urged antitrust agencies to consider using the blockchain technology. As a two-step process to promote blockchain for decentralization, they suggested that antitrust agencies should set up new regulatory sandboxes so that more developers can test the technology without antitrust concerns.

“When technology chooses confrontation, the law must also choose confrontation. When the tech chooses collaboration, the law must choose collaboration despite the absence of certain sanctioning it may entail,” they summed up.

If the sandboxes succeed, the agencies could move further with safe harbors, which are similar to sandboxes but with no limit in time or scale as they wrote.