Searching for Asia’s ‘hidden treasures’ in NFTs and GameFi

Highlights

• Binance’s user agreement: “So in their user agreement, when you sign up, you are not permitted to sue them in any jurisdiction around the world. The only place that you are allowed to sue Binance when you sign up to that agreement is the Hong Kong International Arbitration Center... The other interesting thing is, Binance obviously doesn’t want to be subject to local jurisdictions because they don’t want to be regulated, which is a very smart thing to do if you’re in their shoes.”
• The “ski lift ticket” rule: “In every jurisdiction in the world, there is some iteration of what I call the ski lift ticket rule, which is that when you go skiing and you buy a lift ticket, you sign the lift ticket. And when you sign the lift ticket, you say that even if somebody that works for the mountain pushes you off the chairlift and you fall and get hurt, that you cannot sue the mountain. The reality is, even if you just fall off the chairlift and get hurt, you can sue the mountain. Why? Because in click through, one way, non-negotiated contracts, especially with large financial players, there are certain rights that you simply cannot give up.”
• The international rule of law: “Generally, because these companies are regulated, consumer fights happen locally. They happen in your country pursuant to jurisdiction. They do not happen under international law. Because when you’re regulated as a company, you are required to show up in that country’s court system to have the fight. So this is very unique. For a lot of reasons, but most interestingly to me is because consumer arbitration as a world, as a group, as a community, this is really one of the first times that the question has not been consumers of this jurisdiction or consumers of that jurisdiction, but the consumers of the world and a community.”
• Demarcation of corporate assets: “Bitcoin, Ethereum, those are community assets. I think those should be minimally regulated. The corporations that utilize community assets to make profit from consumers, those are corporations trying to make a profit. And right now, they’re doing a good job of wrapping themselves in the cloak of community assets, but they are not community assets. The internet is a community asset. Amazon is not. The blockchain is a community asset. Binance is not. And so I think that that is the line of demarcation that we need to have.”