Cyber law: touching the future

In this article for New Law Journal, I share my predictions for the coming year alongside colleagues Dean Armstrong QC, Michael Patchett-Joyce FCIArb, Celso De Azevedo FCIArb, Racheal Muldoon, Shyam Thakerar, Ceri Davis and Fergus McCombie.

Read the full New Law Journal article.

Blockchain—predictions for 2022

While cryptocurrencies tend to dominate blockchain discourse, blockchain’s wider application as a general distributed ledger (or database) has increasingly been recognised as a way to build trust and increase transparency in other domains over the past year.

In the context of the pandemic, for example, while high demand for vaccines and pharmaceuticals has led to increased issues of counterfeiting, blockchain has been touted as a way to provide greater supply-chain transparency and even facilitate vaccine passports, given its ability to permanently and verifiably record (say) a vaccine’s journey from a manufacturer to an arm.

Blockchain’s transparency and immutability have also led to it being proposed as a tool in the fight against climate change. Indeed, the World Bank recently considered blockchain for auditing carbon assets, to allow countries to demonstrate their compliance with environmental targets. On the back of COP26, other blockchain-backed climate change mitigation platforms have also been promoted, including for the potential issuance and exchange of carbon credits as non-fungible tokens (NFTs).

As blockchain has driven such innovation, third-party providers have stepped in to make it more accessible and affordable. Rather than relying on opensource, community powered (or their own) solutions, companies can now provision ‘Blockchain-as-aService’ (BaaS) systems from intermediaries on vendor-supplied infrastructure.

While BaaS will undoubtedly fuel blockchain’s growth over the coming year, the simplicity it promises also looks likely to provide fertile ground for lawyers.

GDPR concerns about blockchain technology also continue to persist, particularly given there is relatively little caselaw on the topic, and the addition of a BaaS intermediary in an already complex network environment could further complicate questions about a data subject’s rights to rectification, erasure and restriction of processing (Articles 15-17 respectively) as well as others. That said, BaaS also provides increased opportunities for lawyers to help organisations better mitigate these risks.

Contracts with BaaS providers could feasibly accommodate an organisation’s licensing, development, maintenance, confidentiality, uptime, network participation, regulatory and liability requirements. As some BaaS providers are established technology players, organisations may now also more readily and affordably be able to insure against certain threats.

Whether through its potential to build trust and transparency, or its increased availability and ubiquity, blockchains look set to continue transforming (and increasing the legal complexity of) how organisations operate and transact in 2022.