Tokenisation and corporate and investment law

Tokenisation opens up new financing opportunities for companies, and investment opportunities for retail and institutional clients. But it also raises a number of major legal issues: in order to protect investors, virtually every jurisdiction has strongly regulated both the issuance of securities and the circulation on secondary markets. This Chapter briefly outlines the main business operations that tokenisation allows to implement with regard to securities, then investigates the legal challenges that such operations face in some selected jurisdictions, and lastly provides an overview of how the legislators, regulators and courts have been handling such challenges. The conclusion points to a clear distinction between systems that have opened up to innovation in this area, and others that adopt a much more restrictive approach.