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Дописи каналу
Digital & Analogue Partners💰 is looking for a Mid-Level Economist / Research Analyst to join our Market Research team.
You will work directly with the Market Research Lead on consulting projects at the intersection of competition economics, regulation, digital markets and AI.
What You Will Do
🔹 Conduct economic and competition analysis of digital markets, business models and market dynamics.
🔹 Analyse laws, regulation and policy developments that may affect technology development and business models.
🔹 Prepare memos, presentations and other client-ready materials.
🔹 Help develop AI-powered research and workflow tools that make research and project work faster and more efficient.
Who We Are Looking For
👇Degree in Economics or a closely related field.
👇2+ years of relevant professional experience in consulting, economic research, competition/regulatory analysis, strategy, public policy or digital markets.
👇Good understanding of competition economics, industrial organisation and digital markets.
👇Ability to read legislation, regulatory decisions and other legal materials and understand their business implications. A formal law degree is not required, but a legal background (whether through a degree, relevant coursework, or practical experience working with legislation or regulatory matters) would be a significant advantage.
👇Strong research and critical-thinking skills.
👇Working English (B2+/C1) and fluent Russian.
👇Confident use of modern AI research tools and an interest in automation.
What We Offer
🔹 Fully remote work, with a preference for candidates based in Europe.
🔹 Work with leading international digital and technology companies.
🔹 A cross-functional environment bringing together economists, lawyers and technology specialists.
🔹 Competitive compensation.
🔹 Strong opportunities for professional growth, including the ability to develop in different directions and take ownership of new initiatives and internal projects.
How to Apply
Please send your CV and a short cover letter in English to e.klyukhina@dna.partners by September 9, 2026, explaining your relevant experience and why you would like to join D&A Partners.
Please write the cover letter without using AI tools. We want to see your own writing, reasoning and motivation.
| 2 |  🔈 Has a watermark replaced copyright? Why Anthropic now marks every Claude text
On August 14, Anthropic confirmed that new Claude models embed an invisible, machine-readable watermark in every text they write. The trigger is the EU AI Act: from August 2, 2026, synthetic content must be marked. Behind it sits a harder question — what becomes of the authorship of the human who used AI as a tool?
What happened?
🔹 Models released on or after August 2, 2026, weave signals into the text, invisible to a reader. They change nothing, are read with a key held by Anthropic, and survive anything short of a rewrite.
🔹 The basis is Article 50(2) of the AI Act and the Code of Practice on Transparency of AI-Generated Content, signed in July by some 190 companies. Fines reach 3% of global turnover.
🔹 Anthropic marks worldwide, not only in the EU, saying it has found no way to limit this by region. It covers the web app, the API, Claude Code, and cloud deployments.
Who is the author when a machine did the work?
🔹 The same argument was tested 140 years ago, and it did not hold. In January 1882, Napoleon Sarony posed Oscar Wilde for a portrait, "Oscar Wilde No. 18". A lithographic company printed 85,000 copies without asking, then argued that a photograph has no author: the machine made it, the man merely worked it.
🔹 On March 17, 1884, the US Supreme Court disagreed. Sarony chose the pose, the costume, the light and shade; he evoked the expression. That creative control made him the author of an original work of art. In 2025, the US Copyright Office applied the same logic to AI: as a tool it does not erase authorship where the human keeps control.
🔹 Now imagine every photograph had carried a mark reading "made by a machine, not by a man". Who would buy marked non-art?
Our view💰
🔹 Anthropic points to EU regulation but goes further than it. Article 50(2) does not extend to editing that leaves the original's meaning unchanged. It has not built in that exception, and marks globally where only the EU demands it.
🔹 In our view, the consequences reach beyond transparency. A text marked "AI" reads as ownerless: free to copy, free to train on. The right does not disappear, but in a dispute the burden quietly shifts, and the human must prove authorship of their own work.
🔹 There is also the question of who holds the key. One company applies the mark and reads it, and has an interest in training data. Infrastructure sorting the human from the machine at scale does not belong to a party with a commercial stake in the answer.
🔹 Some marks are due: deepfakes, synthetic avatars, and AI influencers should be labeled to protect people from fraud. But a blanket mark on all a model touches serves a different purpose.
🔹 If you work with AI, record your creative process. Drafts, versions, edit history, and prompts are what will prove authorship, exactly as Sarony did. Mark your materials with the © notice too: it makes it harder to claim your work was used in good faith. | 21 |
| 3 |  🔈 Amazon fails to block a third-party AI agent: the court held that it is the user, not the agent, who accesses the site
On 4 August 2026, the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit set aside the injunction that had prevented Perplexity from using its Comet AI Assistant on Amazon. At least for now, Amazon has not been able to stop a third-party agent by relying on computer-security legislation.
What happened?
🔹 Comet is Perplexity's AI agent that works with websites at the user's direction: it searches for products, adds them to the basket and places orders, including on Amazon.
🔹 Amazon objected to this use of its platform and brought a claim under the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) and its California equivalent, the CDAFA — legislation on unauthorised access to computer systems.
🔹 The district court temporarily prohibited Perplexity from using Comet on Amazon pending resolution of the dispute on the merits. It is that injunction the appeal court set aside.
🔹 Importantly, this is not a decision on the outcome of the dispute. To maintain the preliminary injunction, Amazon had to show a sufficient likelihood of success on the merits of its claims — the court found that it had not done so, and remanded the case to the district court.
Why did the court set aside the injunction?
🔹 To succeed under the CFAA, Amazon has to show, among other elements, that Perplexity intentionally accessed a protected computer without authorisation. The central question was therefore not whether an AI agent was involved, but who was actually accessing Amazon's systems.
🔹 Technically, the process works as follows: the Assistant operates in the user's browser, Perplexity's servers receive screenshots from that browser and return instructions to the user's device. Perplexity's infrastructure never enters Amazon's systems.
🔹 Hence the court's conclusion: it is the user who launched the agent who accesses Amazon, not Perplexity. There is simply no unauthorised access in the sense that computer-security legislation gives to that term.
🔹 The court also rejected Amazon's arguments on irreparable harm: maintaining the injunction would burden Perplexity and would not serve the public interest, as it would impair consumer choice and needlessly limit the development of a nascent technology.
Our view💰
🔹 The judgment does not deprive Amazon of its means of control — it closes off only one of them. Computer-security legislation cannot be relied on in circumstances of this kind, but nothing prevents the platform from expressly prohibiting the use of AI agents in its terms of service: contractual restrictions were not affected by the decision.
🔹 The difficulty is that this is a question of balance for Amazon. A prohibition in the terms of use would affect not Perplexity but Amazon's own customers: those who want to shop in new ways would see it as a restriction, and some would simply move to platforms where such practices are permitted. Keeping agents out without losing users is a problem platforms will now have to solve for themselves.
🔹 If you are developing or deploying AI agents, we can help you assess the legal risks of the technical model you have chosen and monitor developments in the jurisdictions that matter to you.
If you have questions or are facing a similar situation with a platform, leave a comment — we are happy to discuss your case. | 20 |
| 4 | BitMEX invented the crypto perpetual swap back in 2016. This September, it's shutting down — right as the product it created hits record volume. And on the very same day it announced the wind-down, a proposed class action landed against it, alleging an internal "Insider Trading Desk" that traded against BitMEX's own customers and kept running even as server freezes locked everyone else out.
Digital & Analogue Partners' partner Yuriy Brisov💰 unpacked the case for DeFi Rate: why the plaintiffs are demanding their coins back rather than damages, how BitMEX's own terms were written to defeat exactly that claim, why a solvent wind-down could quietly turn "a claim for coins into a claim for 2018 dollars" — and the one thing that will decide it all: the server logs.
✅ Read the full piece on DeFi Rate. | 27 |
| 5 |  🌎 July 2026: Three Jurisdictions Move from Rules Written to Rules Binding; US Adds Licensing, Rulemaking and an Exchange Closure
July Highlights:
🇯🇵 Japan: The House of Councillors passed FIEA amendments on 15 July, completing National Diet approval. Crypto assets are reclassified as financial instruments; a flat 20.315% tax replaces rates up to 55% from 2028; insider dealing is banned; an ETF pathway opens; the maximum prison term for unlicensed operators rises from 3 to 10 years.
🇪🇺 European Union — MiCA deadline: On 1 July 2026, the MiCA transitional period expired. Only 244 of the 1,200+ formerly nationally-registered crypto firms obtained full MiCA authorisation. Those without a licence must stop serving EU clients; ESMA confirmed there will be no extension.
🇪🇺 European Union — Sanctions: The EU Council adopted the 21st Russia sanctions package on 23 July (Regulation 2026/1848), designating 14 named crypto platforms and introducing a new power to ban crypto services from entire third countries that facilitate sanctions evasion.
🇪🇺 European Union — ESMA: On 8 July, ESMA launched a Common Supervisory Action to review the digital operational resilience of all authorised CASPs, with a focus on how firms protect client assets in custody. Reviews run through H1 2027.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: July was implementation month for the FCA's new cryptoasset regime. An authorisation application preview was published on 8 July, a regulatory webinar was held on 17 July, and two prudential guidance consultations closed on 30 July. The authorisation window opens 30 September 2026.
🇹🇼 Taiwan: The Legislative Yuan passed the Virtual Asset Service Act on 30 June. It requires FSC licences for seven categories of crypto service, 100% reserves for stablecoins, and sets criminal penalties for unlicensed operations.
🇰🇷 South Korea: The Ministry of Economy and Finance announced a proposal on 15 July to amend the State Property Act of 1950 to classify crypto assets as state assets for the first time. The amendment still requires National Assembly approval.
🇷🇺 Russia: The State Duma (21 July) and Federation Council (24 July) passed a crypto market law and sent it to President Putin for signature. The Bank of Russia published draft digital depository regulations on 28 July.
🇧🇾 Belarus: Regulatory provisions on cryptobanks were reported to take effect on 18 July 2026 under Presidential Decree No. 19 and National Bank Resolution No. 167.
🇺🇸 United States — SEC: The SEC's 2026 Unified Regulatory Agenda lists three crypto rulemakings (RIN 3235-AN38, AN48, AN49) targeting crypto asset offerings, broker-dealer capital rules, and market structure. All are at proposal stage.
🇺🇸 United States — Enforcement: BitMEX announced on 23 July that it will permanently cease operations on 23 September 2026, ending an 11-year run following more than $200 million in US regulatory penalties.
Stay ahead of the curve with our latest CryptoMap Monthly Digest. Check out the full breakdown here! 🚀 | 31 |
| 6 | 🔈 FATF comes for DeFi
On 21 July 2026, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF) published its Targeted Report on Regulatory Challenges from Decentralised Finance. If you build, invest in or bank a DeFi protocol, this is the document your regulator and your banking partner will be reading this autumn.
Why FATF matters well beyond crypto: FATF sets the rules of the game across financial markets. When it grey-lists a jurisdiction (Iraq and Bosnia and Herzegovina joined in June), banks worldwide tighten scrutiny of anything touching that country: payments slow, correspondent lines close, capital leaves. FATF has no enforcement power of its own and has never needed any.
Crypto already knows how this works. Recommendation 15, extended to virtual assets in 2018–2019, is the source code of essentially every major crypto regime in force today, from MiCA to Singapore and the UAE: exchange licensing, KYC, the Travel Rule.
The same machinery is now pointed at DeFi. The numbers explain why: 132 of 142 surveyed jurisdictions apply no FATF standards to DeFi at all, four have licensing regimes on the books, and exactly two have ever licensed a DeFi arrangement. Meanwhile, TVL stands at USD 86.6bn, up roughly 85% on 2023.
The good news first, and there is real good news. FATF does not treat DeFi as inherently illicit and does not extend the standards to code. Smart contracts are not VASPs (virtual asset service providers). The settlement layer is out of scope. Price appreciation and rewards distributed broadly to holders who exercise no control are expressly not "significant economic benefit". Genuinely decentralised arrangements fall outside the standards altogether, and Bitcoin remains the clean case: no identifiable creator, nobody steering the chain, nobody extracting revenue the way a business does. Better still, protocols that embed compliance at the protocol or interface layer, through third-party KYC, allow-lists or zero-knowledge proof of verification, may see regulated counterparties calibrate their controls downwards. Compliant DeFi is now a recognised category rather than a contradiction in terms.
The hard news: decentralisation theatre is over. FATF sorts arrangements into three buckets.
1️⃣ Centralised, with identifiable controllers. Regulated as VASPs, always.
2️⃣ Centralised, but the controllers cannot be identified. Still in scope; authorities keep looking, and refusal to engage can end in a national ban.
3️⃣Truly decentralised. Out of scope, with risk managed through the neighbours: stablecoin issuers who can freeze, fiat on- and off-ramps, front-end operators.
Where control is found: admin and upgrade keys; unilateral power over fees and parameters; the treasury; whitelisting; appointing developers, multisig signers and oracle operators; protocol fee flows to identifiable addresses; and governance concentration, where under 1% of wallets holding a voting majority reads as control, whatever the documentation says. A DAO migration that leaves the founders with the tokens, the proposals and the fees is a transfer on paper only. Front-ends are treated as live exposure, not a neutral website.
Then the jurisdictional hook. A corporate controller licenses where it is incorporated; a controller who is a natural person licenses where they live and do business. The island does not help if the founder is in Lisbon.
What unregulated DeFi should do now:
👇test itself against FATF's control indicators before a regulator or a bank does;
👇where control exists, register and build a VASP-grade compliance programme;
👇appoint a point of contact for authorities (for genuinely decentralised projects that falls to the founders);
👇document the governance structure and the evidence behind any claim of decentralisation;
👇run regular smart contract security audits.
And for anyone on the other side of the trade: institutions and VASPs that cannot complete diligence on a DeFi arrangement are told to walk away.
To have your project audited against the new indicators, talk to D&A Partners. | 29 |
| 7 | "Is it legal to train AI on someone else's content?" is the wrong question. No court is answering it.
They're answering two others: where did you get the content, and what does your model hand back to the user? Almost every case turns on those.
70+ lawsuits in three years, across eight separate fronts — books, images, music, news, characters, scraping, voice, databases. A win for Meta on books tells you nothing about your image generator. A ruling on a legal database tells you more than you'd think.
At D&A Partners we mapped all eight: what's settled, what's still open, what it means for your product.
Read below 👇 | 34 |
| 8 |  🔈 How Regulation Can Become a Growth Opportunity
Regulation often seems designed only to restrict business and add new obligations. But that's not always the case. In digital regulation, new obligations for the biggest tech companies can actually make life easier for smaller players — creating opportunities and even opening entire markets.
That's exactly what's happening now in the UK fintech space.
What happened?
In July 2026, the UK's competition regulator (CMA) opened consultations on allowing alternative payment methods outside the App Store and Google Play, and giving third-party companies access to the iPhone's NFC chip.
Apple and Google have long restricted developers from using alternative payment solutions within their mobile ecosystems — effectively adding extra fees for paid apps, subscriptions, and digital content sales, costs often passed on to users. Apple Pay and Google Pay aren't the only payment providers out there; the real barrier has been technical access. If these restrictions are lifted, a new market could open up for fintechs and alternative payment providers.
Why expect this outcome?
A similar process already played out in the EU. In July 2024, the European Commission required Apple to give third-party mobile wallet developers free access to the iPhone's NFC chip. New payment products followed quickly:
🔹 PayPal launched its first contactless mobile wallet in Germany in May 2025, letting users pay in physical stores directly through the app — over 1 million users adopted it within a month.
🔹 Vipps, the Norwegian fintech, became the first to launch standalone contactless payment on iPhone as an Apple Pay alternative in December 2024. By May 2025 it had over 1 million active users; by November 2025 it expanded to Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Sweden; by April 2026 it had processed over 100 million contactless payments — making it a genuine Apple Pay competitor.
🔹 Klarna rolled out contactless payments in 14 European countries in December 2025, bringing its installment model into physical retail.
Our take💰
🔹 The European experience shows a direct link between regulation and new product development. Once the infrastructure opened up, companies gained access to distribution channels and payment scenarios previously controlled by platform owners.
🔹 The UK is heading down the same path. If the proposed measures pass, its market could shift toward a more open mobile ecosystem model too.
This shows why legal teams shouldn't just track requirements aimed directly at their own company — spotting regulatory shifts in adjacent markets can reveal new business opportunities. That requires ongoing monitoring across jurisdictions.
🔹 If you lack the resources for this, we can help build a systematic process — tracking key changes across countries, assessing their impact on your business, and surfacing new opportunities. We integrate D&A's Trendwatching into legal and business teams' workflows so regulation becomes a tool for decision-making and growth.
🔹 If you're curious how this approach works, leave your questions in the comments or message our bot — we'd be happy to offer a personal consultation. | 46 |
| 9 |  How to See Where Tech Regulation Is Heading
In-house lawyers at technology companies rarely lack regulatory information. The problem is the opposite: there is too much of it at once — legislative proposals, guidance, judgments, regulators' warnings, analytical reports.
Reading all of it is impossible, and working out what actually concerns your company is harder still. The skill that matters is not tracking every event but distinguishing a structural shift that will reshape the market from one-off noise that changes nothing. Those who assemble weak signals into a single picture gain time to adapt their products in advance. The rest learn about the risk after the fact.
This is the subject of our new article in Chambers and Partners Information Technology 2026, where we analyse three trends in EU digital regulation that are gathering pace, and show how cases that appear unrelated at first glance reflect the same underlying process.
Trend 1️⃣. AI localises. Digital sovereignty has reached Europe and is now shaping industrial and investment policy. AI and cloud computing have become a new zone of critical infrastructure in which the EU depends heavily on non-European providers. Localisation requirements are broadening beyond data to software and personnel, so that the decisions that matter most can be controlled within the EU.
Trend 2️⃣.Privacy in the digital environment is coming to an end. Personalised pricing, advertising and recommender systems are drawing closer scrutiny. Data collection has reached a scale at which privacy is unattainable in practice, even under strict European rules. Beyond direct limits on processing, regulators are reaching for other instruments to return control to users: people should understand what is offered and why, how platforms target them, and be able to opt out of hyper-personalisation.
Trend 3️⃣. Digital awareness is growing. Formal compliance with consumer protection rules and detailed terms of service are no longer enough — platforms are expected to put themselves in the position of an average user. Users increasingly treat their attention as a finite resource, and regulators increasingly treat dark patterns as an infringement. User trust is becoming as much of an asset as engagement.
Practical implications
The article closes with four questions that help assess how far these trends already affect your company. If they do not yet, our forecast is that they will affect every digital business within two to three years.
This does not mean action is required today. But if you intend to maintain a competitive advantage in the long run, doing so without understanding regulatory trends is no longer possible.
🚀 Read the full article here. | 409 |
| 10 |  D&A Partners💰 Partner Ekaterina Bronsky shares the promised insights from Oxford.
What is this video about?
In this video, Ekaterina asks a very important question: what if we are trying to explain AI markets using concepts developed for the previous generation of digital markets?
AI technologies are evolving so quickly that our thinking simply does not always keep pace. So, by default, we assume that the familiar mechanics apply to AI markets too: network effects, economies of scale, and the critical role of big data.
But if we look deeper, AI markets are significantly different from the digital platforms we have known so far.
Why does this matter?
Because if the nature of AI markets is different, market power may lie in entirely different sources. We may see new mechanisms for retaining attention. New forms of user engagement and, potentially, user dependency.
There are no definitive answers to many of these questions yet. But sometimes the most important thing is to ask the right question at the right time.
Which is exactly what Ekaterina does in this video.
Watch — and we'd be very interested to hear your thoughts! | 33 |
| 11 |  🔈 Grand Exodus, Part II: Binance Attempts an Abu Dhabi Workaround — ESMA Closes the Loophole
Previously, we covered the Grand Exodus: how, from 1 July, MiCA effectively closed the EU market to all crypto companies operating without a CASP licence, and how Binance withdrew its application in Greece at the last moment, leaving itself without authorisation by the deadline. That deadline has now passed, and the story has taken another turn.
What’s New
🔸 ESMA has made its position unequivocally clear: after 1 July, clients in the EU may be served only by a legal entity holding a MiCA licence. Regulatory protections apply exclusively to the EU-licensed entity, and to no other company within the group.
🔸 The statement follows changes announced by Binance itself. The exchange informed users that it is restructuring its services in several EU countries, including hPoland, France, Spain and Italy. Users elsewhere were told that “no action is currently required”, provided they are not located in a jurisdiction where Binance operates through a locally incorporated legal entity.
🔸 At the same time, screenshots allegedly showing responses from Binance customer support began circulating on social media. According to these messages, some EU clients are being offered services through Binance’s AbuDhabi entity, which is regulated by the ADGM.
Reverse Solicitation: A Narrow Exception, Not a Loophole
🔸 ESMA reiterated that a company established outside the EU may provide services to an EU client without a MiCA licence only under the narrow reverse solicitation exemption set out in Article 61. This exemption applies solely where the client approaches the company entirely on their own initiative, without any marketing, promotion or solicitation by the provider.
🔸 Once a third-country firm actively targets clients in the EU, the exemption no longer applies. According to ESMA, client solicitation includes virtually any form of outreach directed at the EU market, including websites, mobile applications, social media, online advertising, sponsorships and influencer campaigns.
🔸 D&A Partners partner Yuriy Brisov💰 explained to Cointelegraph that a license in Abu Dhabi carries no weight under MiCA. From the Regulation’s perspective, Abu Dhabi is a third-country jurisdiction, just like the US or Singapore.
🔸 The key point is that reverse solicitation was designed for isolated situations where an EU client independently discovers a foreign service provider—not as a mechanism for retaining a customer base built over years through marketing.
Our take💰
🔹 The strategy of moving EU clients to a third-country legal entity does not satisfy MiCA where those clients were originally acquired through marketing. A history of promotional engagement undermines such a structure.
🔹 In response to a direct enquiry from Cointelegraph as to whether EU clients would be serviced through ADGM after the deadline, Binance declined to comment. | 39 |
| 12 |  🌎 June 2026: MiCA’s Transitional Period Ends, and the Gaps Show
June 2026 marked the final countdown to the end of MiCA’s transitional period on 1 July. While most EU Member States moved to enforce the new regime, Poland remained the only holdout after a third presidential veto. Beyond Europe, regulators in Japan, Dubai, and the UK advanced their own frameworks, and Illinois became the first US state to impose a transaction-based tax on digital assets.
June Highlights:
🇪🇺 European Union: The MiCA transitional period ends on 1 July 2026. ESMA confirmed that unlicensed platforms must cease EU-facing services, stop onboarding new clients, and begin orderly wind-down. A majority of pre-MiCA platforms have not yet obtained CASP authorisation; Binance holds no MiCA licence in any Member State.
🇵🇱 Poland: President Nawrocki vetoed the MiCA implementation bill for the third time, leaving Poland as the only EU Member State without domestic MiCA legislation. Without a transposing law, the KNF cannot issue CASP licences; Polish firms must seek authorisation in another Member State or cease operations after 1 July.
🇲🇹 Malta: The MFSA opened a public consultation on regulating DeFi and DAOs under MiCA, proposing a new legal category of “software-based organisations” and treating decentralisation as a spectrum rather than a binary attribute. Comments are due by 10 July 2026.
🇯🇵 Japan: The House of Representatives passed a bill reclassifying crypto assets as financial instruments under the FIEA, introducing an insider-dealing ban and opening a potential pathway to crypto ETFs. The new framework is expected to take effect in 2027.
🇦🇪 Dubai (UAE): VARA published AML/CFT Business Risk Assessment Guidance requiring licensed VASPs to move from static, qualitative risk assessments to a data-driven process reviewed at least quarterly, with board-level sign-off.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: The Bank of England dropped proposed per-holder caps on stablecoins (£20,000 per individual / £10 million per business) and replaced them with a temporary issuance guardrail of £40 billion per systemic stablecoin. The minimum central bank deposit share was reduced from 40% to 30%. Feedback on the draft Code of Practice is due by 22 September 2026.
🇺🇸 United States (Illinois): Governor Pritzker signed the Digital Asset Tax Act as part of the state budget (SB 3019), imposing a 0.2% privilege tax on exchanging, transferring, or storing digital assets from 1 January 2027. Illinois is the first US state to introduce a transaction-based tax on digital assets.
Stay ahead of the curve with our latest CryptoMap Monthly Digest. Check out the full breakdown here! 🚀 | 40 |
| 13 |  🔈 Grand Exodus: on July 1, Europe shuts its doors to everyone without MiCA — Binance included
On June 23, ESMA issued a final warning: every crypto company without a CASP (Crypto-Asset Service Provider) license must immediately start winding down its EU activities.
Why now? The transition period of MiCA (Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation) ends on July 1, 2026, and no national regulator can extend it. After that date, serving EU clients without a license is illegal.
The scale. Before MiCA, 1,000+ companies operated in Europe under national registrations; just over 200 obtained full CASP authorisation. According to industry estimates, up to 75% of pre-MiCA players may be unable to continue serving EU clients after the deadline.
What ESMA requires from the unlicensed:
👇Stop onboarding new EU clients and halt all marketing.
👇Limit services to exit only —selling, transferring, closing positions; custody only for as long as an orderly wind-down requires.
👇No serving EU clients from outside the EU, even B2B; no handing custody to unlicensed entities; the "friendly third party" loophole is closed.
Even the giants are caught. On June 24, Binance, the world's largest exchange, officially withdrew its MiCA application in Greece (HCMC) and will seek authorisation in another EU state, likely France (AMF). The press ties the move to a near-certain Greek rejection. Result: no license by July 1, so Binance can't legally serve EU clients until authorised elsewhere ("in the coming months"). So the world's largest exchange formally joins the Grand Exodus — temporarily, it hopes.
🔹 Yuriy Brisov, partner at Digital & Analogue Partners, notes in Cointelegraph that CASP licenses are issued solely by national regulators; the ECB's formal MiCA powers cover stablecoins, not exchange licensing.
🔹 Binance says client funds are safe and accessible; affected EU users will be contacted directly. Watch your email and in-app alerts, and beware scams: Binance never calls by phone or asks for passwords, 2FA codes, or keys.
🔹 Meanwhile, Coinbase, Kraken, Crypto.com, Bitpanda, OKX, Revolut and ~200 others hold licenses and keep operating via MiCA passporting.
For crypto businesses:
🔹 The deadline is hard and unlikely to slip. Operating without a licence risks fines of up to €5M or 5% of annual turnover, cease-and-desist orders, and an EU ban.
🔹 Two paths only: obtain CASP authorisation, or exit in an orderly way without exposing clients or yourself.
🔹 The lesson is stark: even a player with 300M clients and 1,500 compliance specialists didn't get licensed in time. "Too big to be stopped" didn't work.
🔹 Clients: check your provider in the ESMA register. If it's not there, move assets to a licensed platform or your own wallet.
✅ Need CASP authorisation or a clean EU exit? Message @dnapartners_bot. | 37 |
| 14 |  🔈 Why Betting on Yourself Is Not Insider Trading
What Happened?
🔸 George Santos, a former congressman who had previously received a presidential pardon in a fraud case, publicly announced that he would attend President Trump's State of the Union address. At the same time, he opened a position on prediction market platform Kalshi, betting that he would not attend.
🔸 He did not show up and reportedly earned tens of thousands of dollars. Kalshi subsequently froze his account and referred the matter to the US Department of Justice and the CFTC.
🔸 Many media outlets described the case as insider trading. However, as a partner at 👍, Yuriy Brisov explains in an article for Decrypt,, that characterisation is legally inaccurate.
What Is Insider Trading?
🔸 A common misconception is that insider trading simply means trading on non-public information. Under US law, insider trading involves trading in securities based on material non-public information obtained through a breach of trust or fiduciary duty.
🔸 No US statute explicitly says “do not trade on non-public information”. Instead, courts derived the prohibition from anti-fraud provisions, particularly Section 10(b) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 and SEC Rule 10b-5.
🔸 The law punishes deception and misuse of entrusted information, not information asymmetry itself. The Supreme Court formally endorsed this “misappropriation theory” in 1997.
🔸 Prediction market contracts are derivatives regulated by the CFTC rather than the SEC. The principle, however, is similar. The CFTC’s anti-fraud Rule 180.1 was modelled on Rule 10b-5 and explicitly states that the law does not require equal access to information. Market participants may trade on lawfully obtained non-public information.
This distinction explains why earlier prediction market cases were more straightforward.
🔹 In one case, a US Army sergeant traded while aware of a classified operation targeting Nicolás Maduro. In another case, a Google engineer traded using unpublished company search data.
🔹 Both individuals misused confidential information they were obliged to protect. Prosecutors brought charges, including commodities fraud and wire fraud.
🔹 Santos's situation is different. He did not appropriate anyone else's secret. A person's own plans are not confidential information, and he owed no duty to traders on the opposite side of the market.
The real issue is his public statement. He said he would attend while betting on the opposite outcome. That is not insider trading; it is potentially market manipulation — sending a false signal to influence the market and then profiting from it.
Key Takeaways
1️⃣ Insider trading is about deception and breach of trust, not simply possessing better information.
2️⃣ The source of the information is critical. Misusing someone else's confidential information may constitute insider trading; knowledge of one's own actions generally does not.
3️⃣ The concern is not the bet itself but the allegedly misleading public statement. Santos's legal risk stems from possible manipulation rather than insider trading.
Our take💰
🔹 The obvious regulatory response would be to ban prediction markets where participants can bet on events they can personally influence.
🔹 However, the problem is not the product itself. A contract on whether someone attends an event is harmless until the person controlling the outcome becomes the trader.
🔹 If the risk lies with particular participants, safeguards should focus on participants rather than entire markets. Platforms can restrict certain contracts for individuals capable of influencing outcomes and subject their activity to enhanced monitoring.
🔹 The future of prediction markets is therefore more likely to depend on platform self-regulation than outright bans. The platform that develops effective safeguards before regulators force the issue may well set the standards for the entire industry. We wish Kalshi success in tackling that challenge. 🚀 | 37 |
| 15 |  +5🌎 Our partners, Ekaterina Bronsky and Yuriy Brisov, were invited to attend Proof of Talk 2026, which took place on 2–3 June in Paris in the truly spectacular setting of the Louvre.
Today, we’re sharing a few highlights from the conference, some photos from the event, and a video from our partners discussing the most interesting developments currently shaping the future of digital assets.
Here are our key takeaways:
1️⃣ Blockchain is rapidly converging with traditional finance and regulators. Many projects no longer aim to replace the banking system, they want to become part of it.
2️⃣ The DeFi movement is increasingly becoming the industry’s outsider. Projects that continue to champion the original blockchain philosophy (private ownership, privacy, and the minimisation of intermediaries) now represent a smaller but highly committed camp.
3️⃣ Stablecoins have evolved far beyond simple payment instruments. Deposits, lending, and investment products built on stablecoins are now becoming mainstream discussion topics. The United States is at a crossroads: the proposed CLARITY Act could open the door for stablecoins to enter traditional banking, while some representatives of capital markets warn that this could create entirely new systemic financial risks.
4️⃣ One point united most speakers:
tokenisation is likely to become one of the defining financial trends of the next three to five years.
Real estate, funds, bonds, equities, and many other assets are gradually moving into digital form, with ownership records increasingly linked to NFT-based infrastructure.
5️⃣ AI-powered payment agents, autonomous trading systems, and other AI-driven blockchain applications are no longer experimental concepts. Many experts expect significant adoption of agent-based payment solutions within the next three years.
6️⃣ Interest in new Layer-1 blockchains and mining continues to decline. The industry’s focus is shifting towards infrastructure, interfaces, compliance, and user experience.
7️⃣ Regulatory fragmentation remains one of the sector’s biggest challenges. Europe, the US, Singapore, Hong Kong, the UAE, and Latin America are all developing their own regulatory approaches. Businesses are trying to build global products on top of this increasingly complex patchwork, while calls for greater regulatory harmonisation grow louder.
🔈 Our overall impression?
The industry is maturing — much like the average attendee at a Web3 conference 😅🤪.
Yet the debate about its future remains unresolved.
One vision sees blockchain fully integrated into the global financial system. Another argues for a return to the decentralisation principles on which the industry was originally built.
There is no clear winner yet.
And that’s exactly why Web3 remains so fascinating to watch.
Enjoy the video and let us know your thoughts (if any))) | 42 |
| 16 | 🌎 May 2026: The Month Crypto Regulation Turned Into Enforcement
May 2026 drew a clear line: the era of debating whether to regulate crypto is over – now it's about how strictly to regulate it. This month, eight jurisdictions moved digital assets from policy discussion into binding law, across enforcement, payment infrastructure, new licensing regimes, and criminal liability.
May Highlights:
🇪🇺 European Union: The European Commission opened a formal consultation on May 20 to review and potentially revise MiCA, focusing on stablecoins, DeFi, disclosure requirements, and obligations for crypto service providers.
🇬🇧 United Kingdom: On May 26, the UK sanctioned 18 entities – including Huobi (HTX) – applying banking-style compliance rules (Regulation 17A) to crypto exchanges for the first time. The measures target Russia-linked networks used to circumvent financial restrictions.
🇺🇸 United States: On May 19, President Trump signed an executive order directing the regulators to evaluate direct payment infrastructure access for fintech and crypto firms. The Fed subsequently proposed a new restricted-account framework for eligible non-bank entities.
🇰🇿 Kazakhstan: A comprehensive digital asset law came into force on May 1, extending crypto regulation for the first time beyond the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) to the full jurisdiction. The law introduces mandatory licensing for crypto exchange operators, formal regulation of stablecoins and tokenised assets, and a split of supervisory authority between the National Bank of Kazakhstan (crypto exchanges, unsecured assets, and stablecoins) and the ARDFM financial regulator (digital financial assets, including tokenised RWAs).
🇷🇺 Russia: On May 27, the State Duma passed on first reading a bill criminalising illegal cryptocurrency mining. Operating without registration faces fines of up to 1.5 million rubles; violations involving organised groups or large-scale income carry fines up to 2.5 million rubles or up to five years in prison, with mandatory asset confiscation.
🇷🇼 Rwanda: Parliament unanimously passed a Virtual Assets law that establishes mandatory licensing for VASPs, AML/CFT obligations, and minimum capital requirements, replacing years of blanket restrictions with a formal regulatory framework.
🇰🇷 South Korea: On May 7, the National Assembly passed amendments to the Foreign Exchange Transactions Act requiring all businesses offering cross-border virtual asset transfer services to register with the Ministry of Economy and Finance. Stablecoins used in cross-border transactions are classified as "means of payment" under the Act. The law takes effect approximately six months after promulgation.
Stay ahead of the curve with our latest CryptoMap Monthly Digest. Check out the full breakdown here! 🚀 | 40 |
| 17 |  🚀 Big news from the RegTech world
The results of the RegTech Insight Awards Europe 2026 are in — and CryptoMap by D&A Partners💰 took the top spot in the category "BEST REGTECH START UP FOR INSTITUTIONAL MARKETS."
This isn't a win we take lightly. The award goes through a rare double filter: first a public vote across the RegTech community, then a final call by an independent advisory board of C-level executives from Deutsche Bank, Vanguard, and Bank of America. Passing both means CryptoMap convinced the crowd and the people who shape institutional regulation.
🌎 So what is CryptoMap?
CryptoMap is a RegTech start-up built to solve one of the most persistent challenges for institutional and capital markets participants in digital assets: navigating fragmented, fast-changing, jurisdiction-specific regulatory regimes. Crypto activity sits under overlapping frameworks — financial services regulation, AML/CFT, licensing, tax rules, securities law — that differ sharply across borders and evolve rapidly. In the EU alone that means MiCA, AMLD and national supervisory guidance, on top of global developments beyond Europe.
Traditional approaches fall short. In-house teams rarely have the resources to monitor dozens of jurisdictions; external consultancy is high-quality but expensive, slow to update, and impossible to scale for iterative decisions. The result is real risk: delayed market entry, suboptimal jurisdictional choices, and exposure to enforcement.
Here's the innovation. CryptoMap converts expert regulatory reasoning into structured logic, jurisdictional mappings, automated workflows and continuously updated datasets, maintained by a dedicated team of legal and compliance specialists.
You move through a structured questionnaire: business activity, token classification, licensing readiness, capital structure, governance model, risk appetite; and CryptoMap analyses regulatory frameworks and supervisory practice across jurisdictions to identify the right pathways.
The output is a customised, jurisdiction-specific report covering applicable laws, licensing requirements, supervisory authorities, expected timelines, compliance obligations, and key risks. Not one-off advice — a repeatable, auditable, scalable product.
🔥 Who it's for
→ Entering a new market. Compare jurisdictions on consistent criteria and documented assumptions, then choose your path before you commit.
→ Launching a product or token. See exactly which regimes apply to your model and what regulators expect — defensible decisions from day one.
→ Legal & compliance teams stretched thin. Work that took weeks of research and multiple consultancy engagements now takes hours, on a consistent methodology.
→ Board-level and governance decisions. Structured, comparable, auditable output that stands up to scrutiny in highly regulated markets.
→ Budget-conscious market entry. Institutional-grade analysis at a fraction of the cost — reports once priced in the tens of thousands of dollars, now productised without losing depth.
The payoff across all of these: lower enforcement and licensing risk, faster decisions, and advisory spend focused on execution rather than exploratory research.
✅ See it for yourself
The best way to understand CryptoMap is to use it. Explore the platform at https://cryptomap.io and see how institutional-grade regulatory intelligence works from the inside. | 44 |
| 18 | For that reason, it is increasingly prudent for protocols to determine governing law and jurisdiction in advance rather than wait for courts to characterize the legal relationship on their own terms.
For builders and investors operating in DeFi, this scenario should already be part of the product’s legal architecture. Technical design alone is no longer sufficient — the legal layer matters just as much.
✅ Full article here. | 1 |
| 19 | 🔈 Freeze Does Not Mean Recovery: The Kelp DAO Case and Ownership Rights Over Stolen Crypto
Cointelegraph Magazine has published a feature on the emerging legal risks in DeFi, featuring commentary from 👍 partner Yuriy Brisov.
DeFi continues to evolve rapidly: new bridges, restaking protocols, oracles. There is no central operator — no one to freeze your account. But security audits struggle to keep pace with product releases, and hackers are exploiting that gap.
When funds are stolen from a centralized service, the playbook is familiar: exchanges freeze assets, law enforcement steps in, and recovery efforts begin. In DeFi, however, there may be no one capable of freezing assets at all. And even when assets are frozen, a deeper legal question emerges: on what basis are they actually returned to the original owner?
The latest example is the Kelp DAO case. In April 2026, hackers linked to the North Korean Lazarus Group siphoned approximately $293 million from Kelp DAO through the LayerZero bridge. Arbitrum’s Security Council managed to freeze 30,765 ETH — roughly $71 million.
But the frozen funds were not immediately claimed by the victim of the exploit. Instead, US law firm Gerstein Harrow asserted claims over the assets on behalf of plaintiffs holding more than $877 million in terrorism-related judgments against North Korea.
Their argument was straightforward:
👇the hackers are linked to Lazarus;
👇Lazarus acts on behalf of the DPRK regime;
👇the frozen ETH therefore constitutes DPRK property;
👇accordingly, the assets may be seized to satisfy outstanding judgments against North Korea.
Aave LLC subsequently filed an emergency notice asking the court to allow part of the frozen funds to be transferred into wallets under its control for safekeeping. The court granted interim relief, permitting the transfer of the $71 million to an Aave-controlled wallet.
However, the restraining notice imposed at the request of DPRK judgment creditors was not fully lifted. The assets remain legally restrained, and the dispute over ultimate ownership is still ongoing.
The case has exposed a direct collision between two legal doctrines.
1️⃣ TRIA (Terrorism Risk Insurance Act) and FSIA §1610(g) allow holders of judgments against “terrorist states” to seize overseas assets belonging to those states. A similar framework was used in Bank Markazi v. Peterson, where creditors gained access to Iranian assets in the US.
2️⃣ The common law principle of nemo dat quod non habet — no one can transfer better title than they possess. A thief cannot obtain legal ownership over stolen property and therefore cannot transfer ownership to a state. This principle fundamentally weakens the plaintiffs’ position: TRIA only applies to assets genuinely owned by the terrorist party itself.
What matters for DeFi users:
1️⃣ Freezing does not equal recovery. A technical freeze is only the beginning of a separate legal process running in parallel with third-party claims.
2️⃣ Between the victim and the frozen assets, there may stand prior court judgments, tax claims, sanctions enforcement or other legal encumbrances — all of which may override purely technical recovery efforts.
3️⃣ A protocol filing claims in its own name may expose the entire project to jurisdictional risks. By appearing before a New York court, Aave LLC effectively subjected the DAO structure to US jurisdiction.
4️⃣ Attribution has legal consequences. If the attacker is connected to a sanctioned jurisdiction, frozen assets may become the subject of competing claims between multiple groups of creditors.
❗️ The conclusion is deeply paradoxical. DeFi was originally positioned as a space insulated from traditional legal structures through decentralization. This case demonstrates the opposite: the more serious the incident, the faster protocols end up in conventional courts.
In practice, DeFi without contracts, jurisdiction or legal wrappers works only until the first major dispute. After that, courts apply ordinary legal principles. | 37 |
| 20 | A $70M DAO vote just collided with a U.S. federal court order, and the legal question now overshadows the technical one.
Arbitrum DAO has approved the release of 30,765 ETH (~$70M) frozen after the Kelp DAO rsETH exploit, with funds set to flow to a recovery multisig run by Aave, KelpDAO, EtherFi, and Certora. But a restraining notice filed in the Southern District of New York — brought by plaintiffs holding unpaid judgments against North Korea, who argue the assets are DPRK property tied to the Lazarus Group — could put anyone in the execution chain in serious legal jeopardy.
Decrypt asked Yuriy Brisov, Partner at Digital & Analogue Partners💰, what the restraining notice actually means for execution.
His verdict: "Technically possible, but practically suicidal for anyone whose name is on the execution." Citing Aspen Industries v. Marine Midland Bank and CPLR §5251, Yuriy explains that ignoring a restraining notice is punishable as contempt — and the standard indemnity covering DAO contributors does not extend to contempt liability. The private keys still sign. The chain doesn't care about a New York court. But every identifiable person in the execution chain now has actual knowledge of the order.
Yuriy also flags a structural takeaway that outlives this single dispute: the Security Council's April freeze "proved a control point exists", and future plaintiffs now have a roadmap for similar claims, regardless of how this case resolves.
✅ Read the full story on Decrypt. | 256 |
