Background The Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) has released an update to Information Sheet 225 Initial coin offerings and crypto-assets (INFO 225). These updates follow the Australian Treasury’s release of its issues paper in January this year, and a subsequent consultation period with stakeholders. Baker McKenzie was involved in the consultation process and delivered a written submission addressing token categorisation, secondary trading in the ICO market, and the current Australian regulatory framework pertaining to…
A new initiative from the Australian Government, the Smart Trade Mark, provides Australian businesses with a new technology to help protect their products from counterfeiting risks and imitation products in overseas markets. IP Australia (an agency of Australia’s Department of Industry, Innovation and Science which administers intellectual property rights) developed the Smart Trade Mark using blockchain and the Australian Trade Mark Register. IP Australia, alongside start-up Agile Digital, successfully piloted the Smart Trade Mark. They…
Unless you’ve been living under a series of highly distributed rocks, you’ll be aware that blockchain (or at least the group of technologies known as Distributed Ledger Technologies or DLTs) is causing a huge stir in the tech world. Almost daily, we see the launch of potentially game-changing new cryptocurrencies or announcement from major corporations of significant new DLT trials or implementations. However, another major force shaping the digital world is the ever-strengthening focus on…
Any distributed ledger used by an enterprise or industry needs to conform to data requirements in the countries in which it operates. Existing blockchains based on Bitcoin and Ethereum codebases can indiscriminately broadcast private data to all participants of a network, and therefore may not always be suitable for use in financial services. Distributed ledgers have been developed that share certain data only with participants who need to see it, most notably R3’s Corda. These…