By FINTECH Books Contributor, Axel Apfelbacher Liberal markets are organised to allow users and providers of services the ability to interact without interference by third parties. They are a central element of market capitalism and have been established in many economies as an element of daily interaction. In each of these markets, we encounter rogue behaviour leading to damages suffered by users of services or products offered. The standard reaction is to implement or tighten regulations that are supposed to ascertain that such behaviour is stopped. This is true for any market, including the provision of financial services. So far, regulation in financial services is almost exclusively targeting the intermediaries that act as providers of such services. However, with the advent of decentralised business models (inter alia blockchain-based models) and knowledge-based systems that cut out the middle-man, the whole approach for whom we regulate and which measures we use to create trustworthy interactions will have to be redesigned as well. In a fully decentralised marketplace, there are only buyers and sellers of services as well as the software connecting the two. Regulation based on managing the behaviour of the intermediary will simply be void once decentralised business models take hold within the community. In the case of e.g. securities issuance on a blockchain, we can regulate the issuer as well as the buyer of securities, but no longer the bank connecting the two. We therefore need to re-frame the regulatory approach and start designing rules that take user behaviour and programmers’ skills and intentions into account and e.g. measure the users’ ability to understand the implications of their actions in the markets. This will include a certification mechanism measuring users’ understanding of the markets they are active in as well as a certificate-issuing authority for software developers that design de-centralised systems in relevant markets. Such a new paradigm will initiate a completely new segment of the RegTech market to establish itself as a central offering for all platform models.