Ep #49 with Dr. Andrew Mazen Dahdal, College of Law, Qatar University

Dr. Andrew Mazen Dahdal is an associate professor at the College of Law at Qatar University in Doha. He received his Ph.D. from the University of New South Wales, where he received an outstanding achievement award in 2014 for his dissertation on the necessity of historical analysis in constitutional interpretation.

Andrew has also taught constitutional and commercial law within Australia and Europe in both fulltime and adjunct roles. Writing on law, technology and global legal frameworks, Andrew is now focused on exploring the intersections between private and public law specifically by exploring the technocratic connections between constitutional and commercial legal frameworks.

This episode of Regulatory Ramblings features a discussion on his upcoming book entitled Digital Currencies and Public Law: History, Constitutionalism and the Revolutionary Nature of Money. In it he advocates for deeper engagement by public lawyers in digital currency developments which threaten dramatic changes in the relationship between individuals and government authorities.

As Andrew shares with our host, Ajay Shamdasani, no modern issue is more widely acknowledged and less understood than that of digital currencies. The voice of constitutional scholars, however, is crucially missing from prevailing digital money conversation. For example, private law scholars are grappling with the legal questions raised by digital currency models in property and contract. Alternatively, public law scholars have yet to appreciate the significance of the moment.

Andrew argues that the challenge of understanding the technical dimensions of digital money innovations has obscured the potential constitutional revolution that digital currencies represent. His book starts with the premise that ‘money’ is best thought of as a constitutional phenomenon. When seen in that light, it becomes clear that changes in the nature of money represent changes in political and constitutional arrangements.

The discussion elaborates on how and why that is so by examining episodes in history where the nature of money was linked to renewed constitutional settlements. The book distills a core set of principles linking aspects of monetary innovation such as technical control of the money supply to constitutional positions such as executive fiscal accountability. From such principles, a conceptual framework is proposed that translates the specific attributes of digital currency proposals into the language of constitutional dynamics.

Andrew also recounts what it was about digital currencies that initially piqued his curiosity as a constitutional scholar and ultimately, what compelled him to write the book. He also shares his thoughts on what he feels the book adds to an already crowded market place on the subject matter.

He concludes by saying that cryptocurrencies and virtual assets herald an opportunity for wholesale constitutional reform the world has yet to see. Andrew notes that certainly when it arrived on the scene and its most ardent advocates were anti-statist, anarcho-libertarians – and even to some extent today – the rise of Bitcoin and digital assets writ large can be scene as a political movement in search of an ideology.

Looking back on the development of money, Andrew said, every fiat currency has been a form of money, albeit stripped of its intrinsic value. Moving forward, he said, there was no way to have a robust conversation about money and digital change without interrogating competing monetary forms.

HKU FinTech is the leading fintech research and education in Asia. Learn more at www.hkufintech.com.

Ep 48 with Dr. Mariola Marzouk (Vortex Risk Ltd.)

In this episode of Regulatory Ramblings, Dr. Mariola Marzouk, an AML expert who has co-founded Vortex Risk Ltd., shares her insights on trade-based money laundering (TBML), and her philosophy on financial crime prevention. She talks about her approach to leveraging RegTech, the importance of human judgment in AML, and her critique of the global financial regulatory landscape. She also discusses regulatory compliance technologies for their failure to effectively combat money laundering and argues that despite claims of innovation and disruption, these technologies focus more on regulatory adherence than understanding the complexities of financial crime. Marzouk contends that while these tools may expedite compliance processes, they do little to reduce criminal activities or address broader social injustices like poverty and sanctions evasion. She suggests a disconnect between industry claims and their actual impact on financial crime prevention.

Read more about this podcast and Dr. Mariola Marzouk at www.hkufintech.com/regulatoryramblings

HKU FinTech is the leading fintech research and education in Asia. Learn more at www.hkufintech.com.

Ep 47 with Linda Jeng

Linda Jeng is a digital economy leader and strategist with over two decades of experience in FinTech, policy, and regulation. She is the founder & CEO of Digital Self Labs, a Washington D.C.-based Web3 advisory firm. Digital Self Labs is a cross-disciplinary advisory firm combining blockchain software expertise with policy and regulatory strategy. Linda helps clients design and implement innovative solutions that empower individuals and enable interoperability, transparency, and efficiency in the financial and digital sector.

She is also a renowned scholar and educator, with affiliations at Georgetown University Law Center, Duke University Law School, and the Bank for International Settlements. She conducts cutting-edge research and teaches courses on open banking, digital identity, and decentralized finance (DeFi). and has authored several publications and contributed to influential books on these topics. She is a frequent speaker and commentator in the media, and a Forbes contributor. Linda holds a J.D. from Columbia Law School and a master's degree in EU and International Law from Université Toulouse Capitole. She speaks Mandarin Chinese, French and basic German.

In this episode of Regulatory Ramblings, she talks to host Ajay Shamdasani about an op-ed piece she wrote which was published by Coindesk entitled “The Biggest Bank Heist in History Is Coming.”

The premise and the focus of the discussion is that regulators are permitting banks to tokenize financial assets such as bank deposits, U.S. Treasuries and corporate debt. Yet, they want institutions to use permissioned networks rather than the decentralized blockchains that keep assets safe from hackers.

As Linda stated in her article: “In February, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency’s acting head Michael Hsu announced plans for new rules on operational resilience for large banks with critical operations, including third-party service providers. Critically, that wasn’t discussed, however, was that the rules would “treat the use of permissioned networks by the big banks to tokenize real world assets and liabilities, an omission that neglects critical new vulnerabilities for the global financial system.”

A key theme of the conversation is that encouraging the use of permissioned networks over permissionless blockchains will inevitably lead to cybersecurity attacks “on a scale previously unknown as the financial system moves to tokenize trillions of dollars’ worth of real world assets and liabilities. The biggest bank heist in history is in the making.”

“By contrast, most successful crypto hacks usually involve centralized protocols where hackers only need to hack the admin keys of only one or a few actors to gain control and steal digital assets. Similarly, permissioned networks are controlled by only a few parties, so they can be more easily hacked than blockchains maintained by thousands of validators. The concentration of attack vectors in the big banks that control these permissioned networks (or the central banks that control non-blockchain ledgers) is like sticking targets on their backs,” she said.

Linda goes on to discuss how she ended up in the legal profession, what drew her to digital assets as a scholar and why she believes the worst attacks against banks have yet to come.

HKU FinTech is the leading fintech research and education in Asia. Learn more at www.hkufintech.com.