Anne Veerpalu successfully defended her doctoral thesis

The School of Law of the University of Tartu has a new Doctor!

On 7 June Anne Veerpalu successfully defended her doctoral thesis “Regulatory challenges to the use of distributed ledger technology: Analysis of the compliance of existing regulation with the principles of technology neutrality and functional equivalence”.

The work was supervised by:
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Martin Ebers (University of Tartu);
Dr. Anna-Maria Osula (TalTech);
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Alexander Horst Norta (TalTech).

The work was opposed by:
Prof. Dr. Florian Möslein, LL.M (Philipps-University Marburg).

This dissertation focused on the treatment of distributed ledger technology (DLT) by existing regulation in Estonia and the EU on the basis of specific use cases.

As the existing regulatory frameworks in most jurisdictions are built for centralized infrastructures and not for distributed ones, such as DLT, the provisions in existing regulation inhibit the use of DLT due to apparent or non-apparent biases.

To resolve the inhibition, the principle of technology neutrality and its sub-principle of functional equivalence were utilized to assess the existing regulation applicable in the specific DLT use cases for bias. Against this background, the dissertation discussed the objectives for these biased requirements and possible regulative strategies and models to resolve these sustainably.

The dissertation is especially relevant considering the goal of the proposed EU regulations of the Digital Finance Package introduced in late 2020 to promote the use of DLT in the EU.

Find out more about the doctoral thesis on the University of Tartu website.