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Countries to Lead The ICO Space

To lead the ICO space, countries must provide an easy to use international legal framework that welcomes many participants from many financial backgrounds.

Dan Gailey, the CEO of Synapse AI, believes that countries need to grant more rights to digital natives, to lower the barrier to entry for participation, and to provide long-term support to help see these businesses grow.

As opposed to the traditional world of tech which gravitates to Silicon Valley, ICOs and blockchains and the crypto space are a much more global and distributed phenomenon. “We are going to see a much broader geographical distribution of companies coming up from not just the US, but Europe, Israel, or Asia. We will even see companies like Telegram doing ICOs that do not even have a well-de ned location, with headquarters that are entirely distributed,” Carlos Domingo, co-founder and managing partner of SPiCE VC and co-founder and chairman of Securitize says.

Gibraltar is also a very interesting case on how to be prepared for the global decentralisation movements. “The Government of Gibraltar has started examining the possibilities of regulation of this area since 2015. The result of their hard work is creating the Distributed Ledger Technology Regulatory Framework (DLTRF). This regulation, which starts running on January 2018, will affect companies and individuals which use DLT i.e. blockchain technologies to handle the ‘value’ (e.g. assets) of third parties.

However, this is not a regulation of the very technology. It’s a principles-based regulatory framework that enables the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission (GFSC) bringing the conduct under the microscope,” Denys Goncharenko, CEO at HighCastle comments. He believes Gibraltar will take the lead in the ICO area, as it has a good track of being the first to foster new industries.

“When, for instance, e-gaming was in its infancy, it faced many similar challenges that the crypto world does today. Despite this, Gibraltar has foreseen the potential in the e-gaming industry and developed supportive regulation to welcome a few of the most reputable companies. Thus, their approach worked, which resulted in changing the perception of e-gaming, and the industry began to flourish. As of now, not one of the 30+ Gibraltar-based gaming companies have failed and they took the biggest share of the market. When comparing this with other jurisdictions, there is an obvious difference, as Gibraltar choose quality over quantity.

It’s the careful market oversight that not only has created more jobs and affected the growth, and also protected the jurisdiction’s reputation and integrity. Right now, only 25 years later, Gibraltar finds itself in a familiar situation with blockchain technology and cryptocurrencies,” Goncharenko explains.

Kate Goldfinch, editor of The Fintech Times

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