Investigator:
Jonathan Pock

Abstract:
Crypto-asset markets have matured significantly over the past years, as evidenced by the increasing professionalization of trading venues as well as bitcoin’s recent $1 trillion market capitalization and acceptance as legal tender by a nation state. There is significant interest from both institutional investors and publicly traded companies to acquire and trade these assets, which has rendered crypto-asset markets increasingly intertwined with traditional financial markets.

This circumstance, combined with ongoing regulatory actions in the U.S., raises the question to what extent insider trading and market manipulation law applies to this asset class. In Europe, regulators generally do not apply the Market Abuse Regulation (MAR) to crypto-assets. However, the European Commission proposed a Regulation on Markets in Crypto-assets (MiCA) in September 2020, which includes provisions specifically tailored to the prevention of insider trading and market manipulation. By comparison, in the U.S., the CFTC has already ruled that bitcoins constitute “commodities” under the Commodity Exchange Act (CEA) in 2015 and has taken numerous enforcement actions to combat inter alia market manipulation. This project aims to shine a comparative light on the debate and provide an in-depth analysis of the novel MiCA draft market abuse provisions and thereby seeks to answer the following questions: Are the SEA, CEA and MAR applicable to crypto-assets? How do certain idiosyncrasies, such as the decentralized nature of these assets, shape the regulatory approach? From a comparative perspective, does the MiCA proposal adequately address market abuse?