Rebecca Haw Allensworth pries open the inner workings of professional licensing boards, showing how they erect arbitrary barriers to work, corruptly influence markets for routine services such as hairdressing, and tolerate bad actors in high-stakes arenas like medicine and law. The Licensing Racket is a call for reform and, where needed, abolition.

Blockchain’s significant advances since 2020 – including a plethora of new use cases – have necessitated a comprehensive revision of the first edition of this matchless resource. While new chapters and topics have been added, the handbook still follows the systematic and structured approach of the first edition. Each contributor – all of them practitioners experienced with blockchain projects within their respective areas of expertise and specific jurisdictions – elucidates the implications of blockchain technology and related legal issues under such headings as the following: understanding blockchain from a technological point of view; regulatory aspects of blockchain; smart contracts; data privacy; capital markets; crypto asset regulation in Europe, the UK and the US; intellectual property; and antitrust law. The foundational chapter on the technical aspects of blockchain technology has been meticulously expanded to elucidate the proof of stake consensus mechanism alongside fresh insights into the ERC-721 Token Standard for non-fungible tokens, decentralized exchanges, staking, stablecoins, and central bank digital currencies. As blockchain law cements itself as a distinct legal field, this new edition is poised to be an invaluable asset for legal practitioners, in-house lawyers, IT professionals, consultancy firms, blockchain associations, and legal scholars. At a depth that allows non-IT experts to understand the groundwork for legal assessments, the handbook provides those charting the dynamic waters of this field of law with a compass, ensuring they are well-equipped to tackle the legal issues raised by the usage of blockchain technology.