How to regulate disruptive innovations? The case of cryptocurrencies, by Loïc Sauce

The first block of transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain was mined on January 3, 2009. Since then, nearly 570 million transactions have been recorded in one of the 650,000 blocks that make up the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin remains today the most well-known cryptocurrency and the largest in terms of total market capitalization: over 200 billion dollars for a total cryptocurrency market capitalization of around 350 billion dollars. To put things into perspective, the market capitalization of the NASDAQ alone – the American technology stock exchange – is in the order of 16 trillion dollars.

Loïc Sauce, PhD in Economics and Professor at ISTEC Paris, is a co-author of this article.