Thank you for the Decentralization Research Center for collaborating on Leveraging Blockchain in a New Era of Antitrust
In the paper we argue that blockchain technology offers structural advantages in promoting competitive and fair markets. We analyze two examples of decentralizing business operations in the mortgage industry and with Google ad auctions.
Flashbots has invested considerable research and development resources into Trusted Execution Environments (TEEs) – which you can read more about here. We are thrilled to highlight the role TEEs can play in disintermediating trust and control in business structures for outcomes that protect user privacy and facilitate competition.
Read the full paper here.
Leveraging Blockchain in a New Era of Antitrust
The current pace and direction of technological innovation have challenged both antitrust law and enforcement. We argue that blockchain technology offers structural advantages in promoting competitive and fair markets and could help avoid the current dilemma of choosing between competition-stifling monopolies and damaging ex post enforcement. As examples, we provide two real-world cases that represent the type of cases where blockchain could be employed to further the goals of antitrust law while offering companies nondestructive means of settling regulatory action.
In providing these examples, we hope to open discussion as to where and how blockchain technology can be used to improve antitrust outcomes. Antitrust regulators should meaningfully explore how novel systems can achieve the outcomes of antitrust policy at the technology layer, reducing the need for antitrust measures and providing new means of transparency, trust, and safety for consumers. Blockchain technology could help prevent market structures that facilitate collusion and monopolization through decentralization, itself a form of antitrust self-regulation. However, even in cases where companies are facing ex post enforcement, or in cases where companies wish to avoid such enforcement, blockchain offers a technological layer that could allow these companies to maintain various positions of advantage while still being in compliance with antitrust law.