I have always been passionate about new technologies applied to means of payment. My entrance examination to become a university lecturer, back in 2003, was on “electronic money”. Later that year, I published a monographic work on the subject. I followed the development of bitcoin, and discovered a whole new and fascinating legal ocean. It is now seven years since I founded BAES, the first laboratory on Financial Technology and Law in the Spanish public university, a research group that I still lead today. This modest laboratory was born with the intention of serving as a “research lighthouse” and observatory on the adaptations of our market to the changes that technology was bringing about and the limits that the Law was setting. I decided then that it was only possible to navigate this stormy ocean with the joint work of the open University Community and technology practitioners. This multidisciplinary approach, we said, would constitute the best imaginable crew and “the methodology of our time”, and we added, the market would be “the subject of our digital space”. In addition to technology, a cooperative Governance key was needed to support research and technological infrastructure, and its “sustainable” maintenance, in order to generate open markets. We had to be prepared in legal science for a comprehensive and indissoluble understanding of both oceans, technological and legal, and to respond to the challenges posed by their interactions.
The question, we said, was not trivial, the Commercial Law doctrine was needed so that its contribution could clarify the new coordinates of the market and its unlawful acts. Hence the importance of taking up the clear “conceptual maps” that have always been provided by commercial doctrine. In this way, it seemed possible to us to assert, as a hypothesis, that Digital Identity and Blockchain Technology could contribute to making the portability of data and assets effective in the Digital Single Market (I defended this in my Public Hearing contribution entitled Blockchain: technology for the social economy 4.0 on 29 May 2019 in Brussels). We applied our research, conducted various proofs of concept (PoC) and finally, in the middle of the pandemic (3 June 2020), we set up BlockchainFUE, which would be the world’s first cooperative company to provide a Blockchain network service. Our goal was to demonstrate that from basic university research it was possible to achieve a real, non-profit application for society.
We have finally mapped the new continent. We have been witnesses and faithful sailors to its gestation and birth. In January 2024 we celebrate the arrival of a new year in which we have managed to turn our laboratory into a Research Group of Excellence (Prometeo 2023), that our cooperative continues to provide a network service and that we have built a veritable scientific barbican, based on the results of previous research, from which we can look out over regulation and technological advances that were unimaginable in 2017. We could say that 2023 raised them to their highest peak, with the democratisation of Artificial Intelligence.
Our objective now is to delimit the territory and consolidate the process of technological and technical-legal decantation, in order to reach a refined and more or less secure construction, legally speaking, of a new building that will be the bastion of the people, as well as the concept and system of Commercial Law of the 21st century that emerges as a consequence “of” the new technologies, “in order” to finance them. As we know, the construction of a new building requires the contribution of multiple trades that come and go, in different phases of its construction, and that, finally, achieve a harmonious structure that can accommodate households, companies, administrations, machines, data, assets, algorithms… that are governed as a community of neighbours.
Technology will continue to dictate how the architecture of the “new Commercial Law” is designed, we will try to ensure that its keystone remains the fundamental rights of individuals, as well as to tell you from the BAES Agora about its advances and setbacks.
We want to share the space that the Proyecto Prometeo allows us and the duty that the new technological and legal reality imposes on us. We are very excited about the opening of a new Community of open debate and we invite the scientific Community to participate in the construction of the building of all, to do it in a multidisciplinary way and given that knowledge does not understand borders, professions, social classes, or schools, we will only ask you to express it in a free and respectful way to all those who humbly want to spread it.
Welcome to this new space, help us to build it!
— Mª del Carmen Pastor Sempere, Commercial Law Lecturer at the University of Alicante and Lead Researcher of LegalCripto by BAES (Prometeo 2023, CIPROM/22/26)
How to cite this post: Pastor Sempere, C., ‘The key of BAES’, The key de BAES, 1oth January 2024, https://www.baeslegalcripto.eu/legalcripto/en/the-key-of-baes-by-ma-del-carmen-pastor-sempere/.
