This chapter evaluates anti-money laundering (AML) regulation of crypto-assets in the UK with a focus on the UK implementation of the EU’s 5th Money Laundering Directive. The UK implementation had a broader scope than that required under the Directive; however, there was a lack of specific requirements and guidance on certain potentially higher-risk areas including privacy coins, mixers, and decentralised finance (DeFi). This chapter suggests that specific AML requirements and guidance on these potentially higher risk areas may help ensure the associated risks are effectively mitigated.

This chapter looks at central bank digital currencies and aims to extend our understanding and the use cases for CBDCs in line with domestic and international economic policies. It examines central bank transactions and how money supply can be controlled and maintained using CBDCs. Over the years, the use of quantitative tightening has been limited due to the current functionality and utility of a country’s financial system. The “Klair Effect” is a form of quantitative tightening; it does not use the apparatus of interest rates to control the inflation rate; instead, a “delete button” to control the money supply on a central banks’ balance sheet.

With the advent of blockchain, there has been an explosion of cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, corporate tokens, and sovereign digital currencies. This chapter details new finance business models and the associated proliferation of digital currencies from the perspective of Friedrich Hayek’s classic work on monetary denationalisation. It also briefly introduces the bridge between centralised finance (CeFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi). We consider the major actors in the digital currency space and postulate possible future developments. We conclude that the rise of and competition between new digital forms of money will only accelerate with significant implications on global monetary arrangements.

This contribution discusses some critical aspects of the upcoming Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) Regulation. There is already extensive and comprehensive literature on the MiCA proposal, and the scope of these brief notes is to consider some – necessarily not all – of the issues that MiCA (as it stands in the original proposal) raises, and that might be considered in the next steps of the legislative process. In particular, we discuss the relationship between MiCA and MiFID-Prospectus rules, the issues raised by DeFI, tokenisation of assets, and some general commercial and civil law aspects.