The European Commission (EC) has announced plans for a new blockchain regulatory sandbox, in a bid to further innovate and develop the industry. Working alongside the European Blockchain Partnership, a 30-country pan-European group set up to further the blockchain industries. The Commission revealed that the sandbox would be in place by 2022. The European Blockchain Services Infrastructure is a joint venture set up by the European Blockchain Partnership and the European Commission to deliver public services on a cross-border basis using blockchain technology.
The sandbox will be used to demonstrate use cases in different sectors.
The regulatory sandbox will also be used to demonstrate use cases across various industries, including digital identity, data portability, and smart contracts in the environmental, energy, and health sectors. The Digital Innovation and Blockchain team announcement also said the European Commission was focusing on developing regulation to support tokenization and smart contracts on the blockchain. Regulators across countries are actively working on integrating blockchain tech in several sectors. South Korea has announced several policies regarding blockchain tech in the past year.
European Commission announced plans for a full regulatory framework.
As reported earlier, the European Union plans to introduce a new legal framework for governing digital currency assets by 2024, in a bid to provide greater comfort for financial institutions in embracing distributed ledger technology. The new regulations will aim to make it quicker and cheaper to facilitate cross-border payments using the blockchain technology and digital assets such as stablecoins. The announcement came as the European Commission prepares to set out its aims to move increasingly towards digital payments and finance. The EU will bring forward draft laws to specify how existing rules apply to cryptocurrency and blockchain and new legislation to cover any gaps left by current provisions.
