The Law School's Dr.Burcu Yuksel presented her paper 'International Payments in Virtual Currencies: New Challenges for Private International Law' at the International law association Conference on 22nd August .
The theme of This year's biennial conference is 'Developing International law in a Challenging World', with academics from across the globe meeting to debate and discuss the issues around so doing.
Dr. Yuksel's paper focuses on complexities raised by the use of virtual currencies and block chain in international payments, and discusses potentials and challenges for developing an international legal regime to govern these payments.
Her abstract is detailed below:
In recent years, in international trade, there appears to be a shift from traditional methods of funds transfer to transfers in virtual currencies based on a distributed ledger technology. Bitcoin is the most well-known example of this new mechanism using block chain. Although the mechanism brings opportunities for international trade by significantly reducing the cost and time for transferring funds across borders, it also introduces challenges from a legal point of view. Currently, there is no international regime that governs international payments in virtual currencies. Accordingly, any problem that might arise in these payments will firstly raise questions of private international law. The initiatives of UNCITRAL and the Hague Conference on Private International Law in 1980’s-1990’s that intended to achieve international regulation and harmonisation for international electronic funds transfers have already shown the difficulty and complexity of the issue. Now with the use of virtual currencies in international payments based on the block chain technology, the issue is once again before the international community and lawmakers but with this time with additional new challenges which will be addressed in this presentation.
Find out more about this year's conference programme here
