탈중앙화금융(Decentralized Finance)과 금융안정

Recently, “decentralized finance” (DeFi) is rapidly growing in crypto-asset markets. DeFi means decentralized applications (Dapps) providing blockchain financial services using smart contracts, including staking and lending crypto-assets, exchange, insurance, derivatives, and asset management services. DeFi typically operates without centralized intermediaries (i.e., traditional financial institutions) and uses open protocols. Although the size of DeFi is rapidly growing globally and domestically, a regulatory regime for DeFi has not yet been firmly set up, and a regulator in each country has not yet established a detailed plan and strategy to regulate the DeFi industry. Thus, many investors may incur losses partly arising from the DeFi operator’s misconduct, unlawful activities, or unfair crypto-asset trading. Moreover, DeFi may impact financial stability since it closely relates to traditional financial systems and the real economy. Considering this current situation, this article seeks to review the current developments of DeFi and to suggest how to regulate DeFi markets. In particular, in specifying a regulated entity, this paper recommends that an operator of DeFi protocols be a regulated target regardless of the existence of governance token holders who influence the decision of a protocol’s operation. Further, this article argues that the recently enacted “Virtual Asset Investor Protection Act” should be revised to regulate DeFi, comprised of those requirements, including an operator’s registration, disclosure of fees and operation status, maintenance of a robust cyber-security, reporting to a regulator, and regulating an operator’s advertisements, rather than revising the current relevant laws, such as banking law, capital market law, and insurance law.