Iota Kaousar Nassr

IOSCO’s 2023 policy recommendations on DeFi emphasise the principle of "same activity, same risk, same regulation" to ensure that DeFi arrangements are held to the same standards as traditional financial systems. Against the backdrop of tightening regulations like MiCA and DORA in Europe and growing geopolitical tensions over digital sovereignty, regulators worldwide grapple with the challenge of applying IOSCO's principle to DeFi. How can innovation thrive while addressing critical issues of security, interoperability, and cross-border compliance?

This roundtable brings together regulators, blockchain architects, and financial innovators to explore the evolving role of DeFi and public blockchain infrastructure in global markets.

Key topics include:

1. Global standards and geopolitics
2. Tech neutrality and security in DeFi
3. DeFi and tokenisation: Reshaping capital markets
4. The future of staking and investor protection

The case for tokenization varies across asset classes and jurisdictions. The calculus – and speed of adoption of technology - is likely to be different for existing financial centres, tied to traditional financial market infrastructure and where incumbents have significant sway and large parts of the population have access to digital money and financial services, and emerging economies, which can leapfrog. Despite that, the public discussion and the discussion in global fora is heavily shaped by the experience of AEs. This roundtable would aim to address that gap, identifying use cases prevalent in Emerging Market and Developing Economies_ (_EMDEs) and fostering an exchange about options to regulate tokenization. It would be complementary to the work IOSCO has done so far, and supportive of the current workstream on tokenization.

This roundtable will bring together market participants and regulators from select EDME jurisdictions to discuss:

a.       Specific use cases for tokenisation in EMDEs

b.       Key regulatory and policy considerations, including barriers to tokenisation

c.       Regulatory innovation initiatives and challenges of moving from experimentation to regulatory reform