We have UCI which is Marina Marina
Hey there, good to us. Yeah, we sit back there and hello Parker.
Hello from Lisbon. Ding dad just messing me. I think we're going to have to take great care to turn off our mics and we're not speaking today to prevent everyone's ears from getting violated.
for reference we're all in one room, one conference room. And I'm trying to send the corner, but Adam is just yelling from one place to another.
Hi everyone, this is Marina from European Crypt Initiative. Hey there, it's good to meet you.
Oh, sorry. Oh, you've been speaking for all this time. I've been speaking. I want a classic. Sorry about that. Oh my goodness. Okay. I'm just going to tweet the link out quickly so we get more people in the room. But anyways, it's recorded.
So if people miss it, they'll be able to listen later. I'm just going to tweet it fast fast, and then we can kick off because I know we have a limited time today. Okie dokie, hang on. Let's see. Is it going to let me tweet?
Oh, oh, what? Hang on. Actually, you know what? What am I doing? What am I doing? Drew, can you tweet the link?
Yeah, okay, thank you. All right, should we kick off though? Let's kick off. It's only family. Let's say so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So we're going to do a really fast intro today for anyone who's going to be listening to the recording later. This is edition 34 of our Back Community Twitter space.
This segment is going to run a little shorter than usual because the fam is coming to us live from the Reg 3 conference in Lisbon where the Solana Breakpoint conference is happening simultaneously. So you know, bend your knees, roll your ankles, shake out your arms, buckle up,
We're going to sprint through the intros and dive right into the questions. And by the way, for anyone who tunes in later, let us know what you think about our new title in the Batcave with guest. There's Drew's idea. So thank you Drew, well done. All right. So our guest today is Marina Marquezic. I hope I pronounced your name right. Please
correct me if not, who is the executive director of the European Crypto Initiative or EUCI. Today, Mariana is here to talk about the REG-3 conference, a two-day summit in Europe's top crypto hubs aiming to promote better regulation for decentralized technology. REG-3 is founded and hosted
by EUCI and the new Instituo economy. Sorry if I put you at any of that. I think everybody here knows about that, but I'll just give a fast, fast run through. So we are the basic attention token community for anybody visiting from the outside today. That is an Ethereum based utility
and secure web browser that blocks creepy third party ads, including ads on YouTube and trackers by default instead it enables users to earn tokens for their attention by choosing to see ads that are privacy-respecting. And you can do all kinds of things with that. You can obviously transact with it. It's a crypto token, but you can also use it to support
Digital publishers and content creators straight through your browser via a Patreon-style donation system You can also use that to purchase NFTs items in several blockchain-based games and more on top of that the browser has its own private search engine research and a multi-chain
native crypto wallet called Brave wallet which has support for Ethereum and EVM compatible ecosystems and also Solana. So very exciting. My name is Jenny. I am a director of community and partnerships at Brave. If you want to follow me on Twitter, I'm that underscore Jenny with an IE.
Jenny with an i.e. But yeah, you guys know me if you don't just follow me on Twitter and come to next week's spaces and we have time for longer intros but we're gonna go around the room and quickly introduce the guests and then we're gonna dive into the questions here. So maybe Kiarm, you want to kick us off today? Yeah, hi everyone. I'm designer and illustrator Brighton.
And I also worked with REC tree, which is a conference that we are currently at with Marina, which is going to introduce himself in Nibed and did the branding for them. And we're currently here just listening to new proposals and I'm very excited to what we have learned today.
amazing. Yeah, am I going next? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, I'm Drew. You can usually find me in the fabricate discord server and helping out there. So also looking forward to
this one as you know regulation and all that kind of stuff going on right now is so much so much going on so excited for this one thanks. Thank you Drew okay that earned
Parker whoever. Oh hey there I'm Parker good to meet you. Good to meet you. Are you bad in? Sorry sorry about that. I'm bad and I give him a brave list.
Awesome. Give it a break please. We love it. Okay, Paola, you want to say it quickly and then I want to introduce the guest. Sure. Hi, hello everyone. I hope that you're having a lovely day. I'm Paola. I do community management for the Batco Starbeek account and also some partnerships and anything Spanish related. Amazing.
Thank you so much. We love it. And then we have some, you know, of course we have that community in the house. I see Nikki B on the Brave team. And then hopefully the room fills up as we continue. But it's okay. It's Friday afternoon. People will listen to the recording later. It is all good. So of course, last but not least, our lovely guest, Marina Markezik from Hang on. The acronym is#
see I, yeah, you see I got it, I got it. So welcome Marina, thank you so much for coming for being here today. Why don't you introduce yourself, tell us a little bit about your background and how you got involved with this initiative. Hi hello, thank you so much for having me, it's been so much
fun being here in Lisbon at the conference and I think it's really good that we can share this vibes with you today. So my name is Marina and I'm the founder of the European Crypto Initiative and basically how we started was exactly two years ago, me and my co-founder, Simon Porro and Floring
We basically saw the markets and crypto assets regulation being published online, which is a regulation that regulates almost everything related to crypto in Europe. So the issuance of crypto assets and also the crypto service providers. So when we saw that we said, okay,
that can be very bad for the industry can be good but there are also some parts that are not really perfect and we need to do something about it. So we all three of us, we worked on our national regulation before so we worked with our national regulators and when we saw the things are happening
opening on the EU level, we said we need to do something and immediately we just organized and started having discussions with the regulators. What was good was that we kind of said we're representing our national associations. So it was really, really, I think really fast. We got this
dates and meetings during COVID online. And this is how it started. So two years from now, we are hosting our first conference. It's a two day conference with a lot of amazing guests and a lot of people. And besides that, of course, our number one priority is talking to the regulators, educating
sharing the ideas that the web tree and crypto community is all about. Hey, that was an excellent introduction. Thank you so much. And yeah, this is a very exciting initiative. It seems like, and I think our bat grave CEO, Brendanike, is also presenting there today.
day. Is that right? Exactly. There's going to be a panel where he's going to speak. So it's going to be, I think, the last panel of the day with amazing guests. We have some other very prominent guests there from from five coin and from some other projects. So I am very much looking forward to that.
Oh, that's excellent. And you happen to know if for those of us who didn't make it to Lisbon this year, are the, uh, like three talk's live streamed or recorded? That's why I had my hand up. If you check through the link that I pinned, uh, if you're very quick, you can actually catch the man in self-rendant doing his speech shortly. Oh, fantastic. Thank you.
Thank you, Battern. I saw here, I'm hand up, and I think Parker has some questions and the team has some questions. So I'm going to let everyone jump in, Buggier, and I did see your hand. Did you have something you wanted to jump in with? Yes, yes. Marina being from UCI, but currently hosting REC tree. I want to understand where is the biggest difference between REC tree and UCI.#
Sure, that's an amazing question. So UCI is a nonprofit organization based in Brussels, which aim is to educate regulators and the directory is just the name of the conference which
organizing here with the Institute of New Economy, which is basically a similar organization but is focusing on Portugal. So on talking to the Portuguese regulator, we met last year exactly here, go in this
place where we are today, with the orienté, in Portugal. And from then on, we kind of really hit on. We would discuss a lot about different topics and we agree to organize a conference together.
So then I know there's a lot of different particulars about privacy, securities, integrating the traditional banking system. But what at the moment has been your guys biggest challenge or biggest topic you've been trying to get?
trying to address with regulators currently. Okay, I love this question. So basically, the European Union has a very complex governance system and we have three major institutions which is
the European Parliament, the European Commission and the Council, which is composed of member states. And right now we have the AML regulation that is being discussed in the parliament. And this is just one of the drafts within the whole AML package.
And this is one of the most important packages that is also, of course, addressing crypto and thinking about crypto. We had the transfer funds regulation already agreed, so those are the rules. They're basically saying what kind of information
So if a person sends a service provider or the transactions between different services, there also needs to be certain information.
information that is following this section. This is finalized, but what we are right now addressing is the AMLR regulation where there are different rules on AML, KWC and different ways of how crypto is also involved in this.
Yeah, I get that. They've been talking about applying the travel law and I do understand how important KYC is, but the at the same time, a lot of the sort of KYC regulations, they sort of cut out much of the third world or the unbanked.
Just because they don't have the documentation that say Western Europe or United States has. So is there a been any discussion about, including these groups that maybe can meet the KYC requirements as much as say Western Europe can.
Yeah, I also really like this question. So what we have been discussing especially in spring this year, I'm not sure if you have been following the European legal crypto Twitter, but we had this this threat of unhoasted wallets being prohibited in inter-European
Luckily this is not the case. Also with our help and with the help of other similar organizations, projects that were really urging the parliament not to prohibit unholy toilets or really severely limit their usage. So I think that we had
But in this case, but of course there's a lot of very complex rules that different crypto as the service providers need to follow. And we have been trying to engage with regulators and explain that there could be also different solutions.
to fight AMO breaks or even terrorist financing in similar because the problem is that of course there's a lot of data online and there can be also a very positive thing because if they would want to tackle those illegal transactions
they can also use the data that is online. And this has also been discussed here in this conference is not only the access to finance or to crypto, but also our own privacy and especially the financial privacy.
So what does this mean? If there's so much data online on the blockchain, plus there's so much data that all this service providers needs to collect in combining those two together, we also know that there's a lot of leakage that happens with a lot of companies
and hacks that can be a very, very severe, I would say, break of privacy. And I think this is one of the biggest challenges we have right now in Europe, I mean, probably globally, but at this specific moment in Europe, for sure.
Yeah, that really well, I mean my biggest I'm Canadian so if you I'm attend attendee of the protests you might get the importance of privacy in Canada So I was wondering a lot what with you know the state of tornado cash of fact compliance in the United States
states, is there any sort of among regulators, any concessions you've been able to work on in terms of privacy or the use of privacy protocols or just defining valid use cases in which privacy coins or protocols would be accepted?
Yeah, so I think I would like to a little bit maybe sum up our privacy panel that we had before, but also adding some of my own thoughts. So basically there are three points that I think are quite important. First, the OFAC sanctions, the US entities and the US citizens, but of course
Of course there's a big, I would say, influence that it had on everyone globally, on Canadians and Europeans too, because the fact that we cannot use turning the cash anymore, there's no frontends. It's really like, it's hard to engage with a smart
contract. So for the average user, that's probably the end of using TornadoCache. And at the same time, we have seen the reaction of different protocols and other applications that have also put those sanctions in place and this may
maybe sometimes overreaction has also resulted in non-US citizens not being able to access certain services in this case also using specific smart contracts. The other thing is we have a lot of questions from different people
about the European side of the story. So what happened with Alexei and why he was arrested in the Netherlands for the ones that do not know he was one of the contributors to Attorney to Cash. He's already in jail for quite a long time since August and a pair
Currently, on the 20th of November, we're going to have more information on what were the charges. They're still not known at this moment. And I think that here it's really, really hard to comment because we don't know what those charges are. But of course, there's a lot of
And I would say at least from my understanding at the moment that Only writing code was not the only problem. So we'll see what will happen, but but this is the state at the moment and the other thing is as you asked what is the
I don't know what is the position of the regulators on certain ZK solutions or privacy coins. I think what we have seen very intensively and very in ways severely happening with OFAC. I think very similar things and consequences.
So, it's kind of a taking a longer time and it's more maybe systematic, but I think the consequence is going to be very, very similar. So, at the end of the day, if some of the protocols and you know,
the 4p project will not be able to be compliant with the AML. It's going to be very, very hard to cash out. So to basically exchange crypto to Fiat and there is the, I would say, probably a catch in the whole story.
Yeah, I get that even if say the European Union did take a more privacy oriented stance, the fact that most Ethereum is proof of stake now, most blocks are produced by OFAC compliant countries.
And just, you know, the greater regulation coming for security's for say proof of stake coins might make it all a bit of a moot point. But anyways, I'll give up the mic now in case anyone else has some questions they want to jump in with.
Yeah, I'll jump in. For the ones of those who don't know, or the ones listening in later, what is the tornado cache and how could this situation impact the rest of the world in terms of regulation and crypto?
Hi, sorry. So absolutely, I think sorry for not introducing the whole topic at the beginning, but in which tornado cache was used as we had one of our guests today.
the conference saying, "Do not have traced use left after really regular usage with crypto." I think this was very important because it's really, really hard to have privacy.
in the space just because of the nature of how blockchain in a way works. And I think that in a way what I would say the biggest problem was, and I was talking to a lot of people about this, and especially the ones that are some lawyers and activists are based in the US, and they had the
a little bit more context on the OFAC sanctions. The OFAC, as you probably read, sanctioned a protocol. I guess Mark Andre, the sanctioned software, which is something that they have done for the first time, never happened before and too
understanding they didn't really understand fully the consequences of this and what this means and what actually a smart contract is. So I think that this is quite a big problem and there was this dusting attack that everyone talked about so basically there was one person that
was sending crypto that was linked to tornado cash to specific wallets, to usually very famous people. And in theory, that would mean that the whole wallet would in a way be compromised.
But I think that later, OVAC also replied with a kind of a clear stance on this. They were saying that that might not be that problematic. So I would say that the first tweet, they shared and they deleted later, could be kind of a
approve that they might not have really understood what happened with their sanctioning a smart contract. And maybe I would add something here that is not directly related to the question, but you probably are not aware of this, so I will not get these questions.
I would want to push this topic because I think it's very important and related to smart contracts. Sometimes it's very important when regulators are pushing some rules that they do not understand what they're actually doing, but they can be very, very
negatively impacting the really the core elements of what we are building. And this is happening right now with the Act that is called Data Act in Europe that regulates data, but there is only one part, like one article, the article
30 that talks about smart contracts specifically and data. So they say how smart contracts needs to be designed in order to be compliant with the data act. And this part says very clearly that they need to be designed in a way that they can be stopped.
So basically it's going in a way against the logic of smart contracts and blockchain and I'm not sure what is going to be the consequence of this. It can be enormous. Right now it's still a draft. It's not finalized yet, but I think that just the thought of having something like this
this is quite alarming and maybe just to put it in the context and then I'm going to stop for others to ask questions is this is not a financial regulation so is data regulation so breaching this regulation or not being compliant might not have
such severe consequences as breaching financial regulation, but of course nobody wants to breach regulation, not being in a way compliant in general. So I think that we have a lot of work to do to basically explain what this means and how
How detrimental this is, I was also talking to some of the researchers that did a research that was based for this data act and they explicitly said that they do not in a way advise to regulate smart contracts in this way, but that was still put in the draft.
That's sort of, and what is the view of, say, normal consumers or customers on this position? Because like a lot of normal people are used to transactions being reversible that, you know, they can get their money back in the case of a mistake or fraud.
Whereas, you know, cryptos immutable, things are one way, things can't be stopped. So is there any worries about, say, pressure from the normal populace about making things stoppable or reversible or just making everything through, say, custodians or layer two solutions?
So I don't think many people in general are aware of this regulation and this data act because it's quite early in the process. And if I think about the general engagement of the community with the regulators is usually very much connected to maybe privacy and
or consumer protection, even us being quite involved in the whole process of the markets and the crisis regulations, so basically something that is regulated by financial regulators. It has been quite weird to them, like who are those people that are in
interested in financial regulation or something that is similar to this. They are not used to having such a high engagement around those topics. And I think that in a way our role is to raise engagement around the crypto community and to come up with
arguments and positions, saying how negative that could be to the industry. But what you ask is quite interesting. I would like to add maybe another aspect that is the data aspect. As you know, European Union has the GDPR regulation that is paying
I'm a sort of word word, but one of the parts in the GDPR says that you have the right to be forgotten. And this is something that is almost impossible to do with blockchain. So it's kind of a very much linked to that. And it's just very much showing that if
If there is an element in the new technology, so in this case blockchain that regulators don't like that much, they would just write a rule saying that we don't support this element and this element should be changed in order to be compliant with the laws that are from the beginning written
in a centralized manner, and if you think about it in general, it is a big challenge. From the beginning of the civilization, we always had centralized entities, and those entities has always been regulated in a centralized way. So that's quite challenging.
I think you had a question. Sorry for cutting you off. Oh, I was going to invite them into. Okay, yeah, I don't know worries. I don't know how much more time you got, but I was curious like how receptive the regulators are to
to your message and what are the biggest hurdles? Is it just them not understanding the smart contracts and how they work or is it just a matter of trying to privacy, or data, whatever it is, what's the biggest issues that they have with it?
I think they're very receptive. We are maximizing our, in a way, the probability for them to listen to us, in a way how we present, in a way how we engage with them, in a way how we are basically formulating our
argumentation but also really from like being timely and being responsive to the questions that they have and they need. What I mean is that it's really hard to just come to Brussels and say I want to talk about this topic right now. What I think
I think it's very, very well accepted from the regulators is while they are dealing with a topic, you need to know of course because most of those information are not public so we spend a lot of time understanding what is happening, when and who is deciding about specific things.
but it is very, very good to present certain positions on this specific topic that has been discussed on that specific day, week or month. So being timely is extremely valuable and we have been doing this since again the first draft that
from Mika came out, but in the future we also want to be more proactive. So having more resources, more time, and more people to basically think, okay, what is happening in the next two years, what's happening in the next three years, because those processes in Europe take
a long time. So if you think about meca being first draft being issued two years ago now is finalized but not officially yet published in the official journal. So the whole process will take four years until it will be applicable which means that the
companies and crypto services provider will need to really follow it. So if I think about the next three years, if there is a new regulation, they're definitely already thinking about it. And I think that coming up with a potential item of principles or some ideas around how this could be regulated would be very beneficial.
Thank you so much, has a great response.
Merina, what are upcoming events? I know UCIs organizing not-or-one close these dates, so can you tell us, can you can you sponsor it a bit and advertise it? Absolutely, thank you so much. So we are organizing
a conference on the 8th of December in Brussels. It's going to be a very Brussels-based regulatory conference, which means that we're going to have a lot of regulators there. We have a panel on the tablecoins in DeFi. We have a panel that is also mentioning the energy consumption, which has been a
really important topic for us and Europe right now is in a way in an energy crisis because of the political situation and with the war between Russia and Ukraine. And the result of this is basically that there is new rules around green finance.
and a part of it is also green crypto. And we are going to have also a panel, an international one, with the international guests like coming from Ayosco International regulators, but also other representatives coming from different continents. And it's open. It's an open
Conference we're going to have also streaming that conference, but the seats are very limited. So if you're in Brussels, message us and let us know that you're going to be there. And I can post about this conference more, more later.
This one, right three in Lesbun, is much bigger and it's in a way more tailored to the community and in a way that the outcome of this conference is also going to be conveyed as a message in Brussels when we are going to have the conference there on the 8th of December.
This is so great. Thank you so much for sharing. Do you have any, are there, have there been any conference highlights so far from Reg 3 that you want to share or spotlight for the community here? Yeah, so I think that basically when we were thinking about this conference, the main idea was to
to, of course, give updates on what's happening on the regulatory side and in a way being a little bit more Eurocentric from the general information, the general legal information that we get from the media because we are in Lisbon and we are in Europe. But at the same time, we knew
that some of our crowd is also going to be lawyers and maybe some people that are new to the space. And what is very important for us is to convey the values that are important to the crypto space and to the ecosystem. So we were combining the speakers as somebody that is a lawyer or
regulator with somebody that is a builder or a thinker or taught leader because I think this is also very important with us as a community growing it's important to share the message and to really understand what decentralization is all about what privacy is all about and that's also why we shared some
of the ideas of the values we think are important. We also shared on our Twitter. We shared this as an open document so you can all add your comments or any other ideas that you have as a community to come together and start thinking about
"Okay, what are the values that we really want to fight for?" Because I think that with the regulation that is coming, we have a really nice opportunity to answer really important questions that have been posed to us directly or indirectly and look internally, you know,
What are we doing? Who are we building for? Why are we doing what we are doing and how to basically share this narrative with people that are not that familiar with it and in a way that they would understand it and help and facilitate the innovation that is built on top of it?
Did I see a hand from Bat Earn? Yeah, I was going to say, um, crypto events and web free in general are so important because you actually get to meet people and don't have to explain everything to them before you can have a proper high level conversation.
What's the best thing you said? Best thing you did running this one and what do you think you could have done to do better next time? So I think the best thing we did is just organizing a conference with the men power that we had.
big struggle and I really hope that we can scale and grow for the next year and next month. But at the same time I'm really happy that we had so many people that were willing to come and basically talk to us and there are supporters from the beginning in a way donating their time to come
speakers and have with sponsorships so basically believing in something that happened for the first time they never had an experience of a rectory conference so basically they trusted us in doing something that would be useful for them and I think that for the next time we want to
In a way be even more focused on workshops because the first day of the conference was just workshop that were open to anyone. We also had a lot of students. We had cheaper tickets for the locals from Portugal. So I think it's very important to include as much people.
as possible and I think that the workshops really bring the value that is needed in discussing such an emerging topics and then combining it with the regulatory aspect. So as the EUCR we usually do organize this workshops but they're kind of a more closed nature.
So we have invites only, but I think that having publicly open workshops and conveying this message and trying to educate the new generation of lawyers, but anyone that is interested on the topic is something that we can maybe improve next time.
Well, it's absolutely fantastic from my side and it's even better that it's immortalized on the internet forever so everyone can enjoy it. Yeah, this has been so. I know I realize we're going quite a bit over time here and I know you guys have a talk and panel to catch but this has been incredible Marina. Thank you so much.
so much for coming to speak to the community today. I think the work that you and you, EUCI, my goodness, are doing to promote better regulation for decentralized tech in Europe is invaluable. And you are so well spoken and communicated, you know, the goals of the conference and EUCI so well for us.
has just been fabulous. Thank you so much. Thank you everyone for setting this Twitter space up and for everyone that was listening. We are too asked, we have our DMs open, if we have any questions, we have discord space and we are also trying to engage with the community as much as possible.
That's excellent. And we'll be sure to pin your links when we tweet after the event. We'll pin all the links so everybody can keep up with with you, CI. And also thank you, Guillermo, for organizing this. This has been wonderful. Thank you, Baton. It's been a team effort. I'm going to say a cheeky bit of advice before I go.
You can always watch the lectures any time on the internet. It's always best to just meet people and have a word of everyone who's actually active in a space while you're here in person. That's a great point. Oh, also, Nikki, who's in the room here, is also in Lisbon speaking
in person. And so is Viking who is here a minute ago. So you guys should all meet up. We're going to the bar light up. Come say hello. Yeah, for sure, me them both tomorrow. Beautiful. This is so great, everybody. Thank you so much. Be sure to tune into Brendan's panel. Follow UCI. Stay up with
up to date with everybody in the room and yeah we will see you in the next one have a wonderful week and everybody and enjoy breakpoint enjoy the rest of the Reg 3 conference everyone who's there and yeah we'll see you next week thank you thank you thank you you have a lovely day