Delphine Forma talks navigating regulatory landscape for blockchain on CoinGeek Weekly Livestream special

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Delphine Forma, chief compliance officer of TAAL Distributed Information Technologies Inc. (CSE:TAAL | FWB:9SQ1 | OTC: TAALF), recently joined Kurt Wuckert Jr. for a special episode of the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream.

Delphine Forma has a long history of working in compliance in the blockchain and digital currency industries. In addition to being the CCO at TAAL, Forma is a board member of the Crypto Valley Association and the OpenVASP Association, and she is often faced with the challenge of navigating blockchain and digital currency businesses through the regulatory landscape that captures many finance, banking, and business activities.

“You don’t really have clear rules, you have the old stuff [regulations], but the old stuff has been designed for a world with mostly intermediaries,” Forma said.

“Today, [in] the blockchain space, the goal is to try and get rid of the intermediary—kind of. So you need to navigate in this old framework and try to see what applies to your situation, if it applies, and if you want to apply it.”

“But I do think as a compliance officer what is important for you is to understand what is the goal of this regulation, and then see, or then be compliant in a creative way making everyone happy. You need to make the regulator happy, but you also need to make the business happy.”

Wuckert and Forma go on to talk about a variety of different concepts and trends taking place in the blockchain and digital currency ecosystem and examining what they mean from a regulator perspective and how a compliance officer may view each of those situations.

They talk about whether or not a lightning node operator is technically classified as a money transmitting business, how blockchain-based data fits into the GDPR framework, traveling across borders with a seed-phrase memorized in your head and what that means in regard to declaring how much cash you are traveling with, and how regulators are viewing the emerging blockchain and digital currency space.

“I’ve now met some regulators and I find it fascinating that you can paint a strawman and then say they’re not going to get it, they are going to be old and stuffy and not want progress, but every regulator I have met has been very curious, they want to help, they wonder what sort of incentives would make sense,” Wuckert said. “I’m curious if that has been your experience too? Are regulators excited and curious or are they more difficult for you?”

“I think they are interested because they have to be interested in the industry,” Forma said. “If you look for instance at consumer protection—as much as I love the industry and everything that is going on, like DeFi, everything that you can do is absolutely fascinating, it’s amazing, but if we really want to let people in the space and if we really want to get to mass adoption I think there should be some safeguards and then some consumer protections, we need to protect the users.”

“As a regulator, we are getting into this topic to protect the consumer, but the regulators also miss a lot of points. I am amazed at the lack of understanding of the technology, from the regulator side but also from the user side.”

From the look of it, the blockchain and digital asset industry are maturing and we can expect more consumer protections to be put in place while blockchain and digital currency-related businesses are held to a higher standard in regard to how they run their business—just like legacy companies, publicly traded companies, and their users and shareholders are treated.

To learn more about the intersection of the blockchain and the digital asset space, the role that compliance plays in both industries, the current obstacles the industries face as well as how certain blockchain and digital asset trends like NFTs fit into regulatory frameworks, you are going to want to watch the CoinGeek Weekly Livestream Special that features TAAL’s Chief Compliance Officer Delphine Forma.

Watch the previous episodes of CoinGeek Weekly Livestream on YouTube.