Policy and regulatory challenges for the deployment of blockchains in the energy field: work-package 6

Among the various digital technologies and solutions, blockchain recently attracted much interest due its perspective manifold applications in the energy, climate and sustainability sectors. Blockchain indeed promises to support several European Union's climate-neutrality and sustainability policies, thanks to its potential to drastically change the market rules and streamline the decision-making processes and the system management mechanisms. The policy and legislative initiatives on blockchains are moving their first but quick steps, worldwide and in the EU, with the financial sector being the most targeted due to the high interest concentrated on crypto currencies and their potentially disruptive effects on the banking and transactive economic sectors. The regulations and policy actions on digital finance/blockchain represent an important reference for the energy system digitalisation as well, since financial transactions are at the core of the energy market operations and certain mechanisms aimed at promoting legal certainty and support innovation in the financial sector can well be borrowed and applied to the energy sector.