Keyword: «digital assets»

The traditional, centralized financial market has been developing for several centuries, but over time people's needs change, under the pressure of social changes, and the current financial structure can no longer provide all the needs of a person. Now humanity is at a crossroads, and it must make a very important decision about how financial markets will develop. In this article, we will look at how such a direction as decentralized finance (DeFi) can affect the financial sector.

In this publication, the authors consider challenges of criminalizing the country's digital transformation. It argues that the rapid development of technologies (blockchain, smart contracts, artificial intelligence) has led to the emergence of fundamentally new, highly latent, and cross-border forms of illegal activity that are not covered by the conservative provisions of Chapter 22 of the Russian Criminal Code. The author identifies and analyzes relevant types of digital economic consequences: algorithmic fraud, the use of decentralized finance, cryptocurrency money laundering, and the inclusion of phishing in the corporate world. Key legal qualifications are identified: the uncertainty of the criterion for a situation as the subject of a virus, the classification of jurisdiction in cross-border digital environments, and the lack of an objective assessment methodology. Based on the analysis, several specific amendments to the Russian Criminal Code are presented, including the creation of a special offence for fraud in the field of digital assets (Article 159.7 of the Russian Criminal Code) and an amendment to Article 174 of the Russian Criminal Code.