Relevance to Theme: A secure financial platform is a crucial part of the world's economic activities. Crypto assets and blockchain technology could be a game-changing technology to achieve this.
Though many crypto assets custodians (e.g., virtual assets exchange) face security issues such as asset leakage, no common security consideration or operational practices are agreed among the entire ecosystem.
Therefore, security and safety to crypto assets and blockchain technology is awaited.
Relevance to Internet Governance: The Internet governance(I-G) community has evolved based on “a multi-stakeholder model” to tackle various issues of Internet resources. It is one of the success cases for people around the world to cooperate for solving problems. We propose to apply the same model for the governance of emerging technologies and society.
Crypto assets are well known as one of the use cases of "blockchain," emerging technology. Its market has emerged in these several years. Many custodians have been launched in Asia Pacific Area, in China, Russia, Singapore, Japan, Australia, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, and Korea for example. Each county has started to discuss its regulation for the trading of crypto assets. Of course, we need the voice of users, civil society.
There are many concerns about the management of risks on crypto assets, such as Know Your Customer(KYC), Anti-Money Laundering(AML), Counter Financing of Terrorism(CFT) and leakage. Some of the custodians have been attacked by hackers, then they leaked customers' assets due to lack of security on their system. Though several industrial associations or technical alliances have been formed, there is neither global nor national/regional platform to discuss those problems by a balanced stakeholder yet.
Even though regulators and authorities are working on making a regulation for VASPs(Virtual Asset Service Provider), the rules and technologies of crypto assets and blockchain are rapidly changing by the discussion among the developers. As a result, the ecosystem couldn't assure that investor/consumer are protected from those incidents. We must have a multi-stakeholder process to address both technical and policy issues.
Therefore, we propose to apply the multi-stakeholder model to discussing crypto assets in this Internet Governance Forum where every stakeholder sit at the table together.
