The previous section summarizes how Professor Edward Stringham describes the early days of the London Stock Exchange in his book “Private Governance: Creating Order in Social and Economic Life”.

The rise of the London Stock Exchange illustrates an instance where the market itself created e...

A notable moment in world economic history was the creation of the joint stock company. It started in Amsterdam with the foundation of the Dutch East India Company and then in England.

By the end of the 17th century, shares of at least 150 corporations were traded at London's Royal Exchang...

In March 2019, Kleros launched the Token Curated Registry of Tokens (T2CR).

In order to have a token accepted into the list, it had to comply with some minimal conditions such as no...

The regulation of financial markets has gone a long way since the early days of the gentlemen's clubs in London coffee houses. After starting as a purely private governance endeavor, the regulatory body for today's global financial infrastructure is a multi-stakeholder mechanism which encompasses...

As the DeFi ecosystem grows, a number of situations will require resolution:

• What cryptoassets should be accepted in decentralized exchanges such as Uniswap?
• What cryptoassets should be accepted as collateral in algorithmic stablecoins such as MakerDAO or yield generating appli...

The emerging decentralized finance ecosystem (DeFi) seems to share many features with the rise of corporations and stock exchanges in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Back then, the joint stock company was a phenomenal financial innovation, a new way to pool and coordinate human work for the f...

Some of our most respectable financial institutions were born in coffee houses such as insurance firm Lloyd’s of London (formerly, Lloyd’s Coffeehouse), the Philadelphia Stock Exchange (formerly, Merchants Coffee House) and auction house Sotheby’s.

It took more than a century for the Englis...