EBI is happy to announce a contribution of Dr Linn Anker-Sørensen (Ernst & Young Norway; University of Oslo) and Prof. Dirk A. Zetzsche (University of Luxembourg) in the EBI Working Paper Series No. 111. Their paper entitled “From Centralized to Decentralized Finance: The Issue of ‘Fake-DeFi” was published on 14th December 2021.

While decentralized finance is one of the latest buzzword in the FinTech space, this paper argues that the reality is a phenomenon we call “Fake-DeFi”, that is a decentralized application in which innovators or service providers hold governance rights, or the technical equivalent of governance rights, which would they could modify the fundamentals of the whole network. The reason for Fake-DeFi are partly legal and regulatory, but for the main part Fake-DeFi is inherent in the market logic: innovators want to capitalize on their inventions. Making profits in a fully decentralized network is incredibly difficult. Hence, innovators turn to the less difficult alternative to create only partially centralized networks and services over which they hold various degrees of control. Fake-DeFi will remain the eminent business model even if law and regulation would provide legal and regulatory certainty and smooth supervision for a cross-border fully decentralized network.

Fake-DeFi asks for a regulatory response. Regulators facing Fake-DeFi as wide-spread phenomenon are encouraged to review laws and regulations relating to governance rights and modes of control. The former includes, but is not limited to, rules on major shareholders and beneficial ownership relating to regulated intermediaries, fitness and properness of key personal, organizational and prudential requirements of dominant shareholders, as well as the definition of financial services groups.

To read the entire paper, please follow https://ssrn.com/abstract=3978815 or https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3978815.