Legal Business

Sponsored briefing: Disruption, disintermediation and disputes

Stewarts’ Marc Jones discusses the implications of crypto-assets for the litigation sphere

The chances are that in January 2009, when the first bitcoin was mined, nobody reading this article had heard of bitcoin, crypto-currencies, blockchain or smart contracts. Less than a decade later in late 2018, the World Bank raised $110m by selling a ‘blockchain-operated debt instrument’. This instrument runs on a private version of the Ethereum blockchain, which creates, allocates, transfers and manages the bond to maturity using distributed ledger technology.