European Blockchain Sandbox Initiative Welcomes New Regulators

According to Cointelegraph, the European Commission has announced the addition of 41 authorities and regulators to the second cohort of its European Blockchain Sandbox Initiative (EBSI). These regulators hail from 22 countries within the European Union and the European Economic Area, including France, Spain, The Netherlands, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Germany, Cyprus, Portugal, Bulgaria, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Latvia, Malta, Poland, Hungary, Slovakia, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Lithuania, and the Czech Republic. The EBSI was launched to support use cases involving distributed ledger technology (DLT) and aims to provide a framework for blockchain projects, regulators, and authorities to engage in dialogue. This initiative seeks to identify legal and regulatory obstacles to blockchain innovation and increase regulatory certainty for decentralized technology solutions. The European Commission stated that the sandbox will allow regulators and supervisors to enhance their knowledge of cutting-edge blockchain technologies. Legal advice and regulatory experience will be provided in a safe and confidential environment. Each year, the EBSI will support 20 projects that build use cases based on blockchain technology. These projects will be selected based on criteria such as business maturity, legal relevance, and contribution to EU policy priorities. The selected projects will receive legal and regulatory advice from the law firm Bird & Bird and will have the opportunity to discuss regulatory questions with participating regulators. On June 13, the EBSI announced the companies selected to join its second cohort. These companies have use cases ranging from real-world asset (RWA) tokenization to blockchain-based digital passports. Among the selected projects is Iota, a crypto ecosystem and open-source distributed ledger. Iota stated that being selected for the EBSI is a significant milestone for its identity solution, opening the door to discussions on KYC and privacy in Web3. This is particularly relevant as many regulators are currently considering their approach to decentralized finance (DeFi).