Gas Aggregation as a Regulatory Model to Promote Improved Security of Domestic Gas Supply

تُسهم هذه الدراسة في تحليل دور تجميع الغاز كنموذج تنظيمي لهيكلة قطاع الغاز بشكل فعال في الدولة، وذلك مع التركيز على كيفية تأدية تجميع الغاز في بعض الدول. يتسم تجميع الغاز، بشكل أو بآخر، بتاريخ متنوع على صعيد تشكيل منظم للعديد من قطاعات الغاز. وقد طُبّق بشكل ناجح في تعريف قطاعات الغاز الناشئة في ترينداد وتوباغو والمملكة المتحدة. وقد تم تجميع الغاز، بدرجات متفاوتة من النجاح، في إعادة تنظيم قطاعات الغاز في سنغافورة وغانا وتنزانيا، كما هُدد أن يتم تجميع الغاز في إسرائيل وإندونيسيا، ولم تنجح عملية تجميعه في نيجيريا.   يُعد تجميع الغاز من النماذج التنظيمية التي يمكن استخدامها لهيكلة قطاع الغاز ضمن اقتصاد الدولة، وترتكز هذه الدراسة بشكل خاص على ذلك. وتعتبر هذه الدراسة أنه لا يوجد نموذج واحد أو مفضل للتنظيم الأمثل لقطاع الغاز ضمن دولة معينة، وتختلف الدول من حيث اعتبار النموذج التنظيمي الأمثل لقطاع الغاز الخاص بها. كما تعتبر هذه الدراسة أنه لا يوجد قائمة بسيطة أو متفق عليها للنماذج المحددة لتنظيم هيكلة قطاع الغاز، والتي يُمكن اختيار ما هو مناسب منها.This paper analyzes the role that can be played by aggregation as a regulatory model for the effectivestructuring of a country’s gas sector, with a focus on how aggregation has functioned and is and couldbe functioning, in certain countries.Aggregation, in one form or another, has enjoyed a colorful history in the regulatory shaping of severalgas sectors. It has been applied successfully to the definition of nascent gas sectors in Trinidad andTobago and the United Kingdom. Aggregation has been applied, with varying degrees of success, to there-regulation of gas sectors in Singapore, Ghana and Tanzania; it has been threatened to be applied inIsrael and Indonesia; and it has almost certainly failed in Nigeria.Aggregation is but one of a number of regulatory models that can be used to structure the gas sectorwithin a country’s wider economy, and is the particular focus of this paper. This paper recognizesthat there is no single or preferred model for the optimum regulation of the gas sector within anyparticular country, and different countries could take different views as to what they believe to be themost suitable regulatory model for their own particular gas sectors. This paper also recognizes thatneither is there anything as simple as an agreed menu of established regulatory models for gas sectorstructuring, from which an appropriate selection can be made

Clearinghouses as Liquidity Partitioning

To reduce the risk of another financial crisis, the Dodd-Frank Act requires that trading in certain derivatives be backed by clearinghouses. Critics mount two main objections: a clearinghouse shifts risk instead of reducing it; and a clearinghouse could fail, requiring a bailout. This Article’s observation that clearinghouses engage in liquidity partitioning answers both. Liquidity partitioning means that when one of its member firms becomes bankrupt, a clearinghouse keeps a portion of the firm’s most liquid assets, and a matching portion of its short-term debt, out of the bankruptcy estate. The clearinghouse then applies the first toward immediate repayment of the second. Economic value is created because creditors within the clearinghouse are paid much more quickly, and other creditors are paid no less quickly, than they would be otherwise. The rapid cash payouts for clearinghouse members reduce illiquidity and uncertainty in the financial sector, the main causes of contagion in a crisis. And because the clearinghouse holds only liquid assets, it avoids the maturity mismatch between short-term liabilities and long-term assets that characterizes the balance sheets of many financial institutions. A clearinghouse therefore is much less likely than its members to fail during a crisis. To ensure that clearinghouses remain stable and systemically valuable, rulemakers should require clearing of a wide variety of derivatives contracts, but should limit clearinghouse membership to dealer firms

SoK: Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in Finance

Recent years have seen the emergence of practical advanced cryptographic tools that not only protect data privacy and authenticity, but also allow for jointly processing data from different institutions without sacrificing privacy. The ability to do so has enabled implementations a number of traditional and decentralized financial applications that would have required sacrificing privacy or trusting a third party. The main catalyst of this revolution was the advent of decentralized cryptocurrencies that use public ledgers to register financial transactions, which must be verifiable by any third party, while keeping sensitive data private. Zero Knowledge (ZK) proofs rose to prominence as a solution to this challenge, allowing for the owner of sensitive data (e.g. the identities of users involved in an operation) to convince a third party verifier that a certain operation has been correctly executed without revealing said data. It quickly became clear that performing arbitrary computation on private data from multiple sources by means of secure Multiparty Computation (MPC) and related techniques allows for more powerful financial applications, also in traditional finance. In this SoK, we categorize the main traditional and decentralized financial applications that can benefit from state-of-the-art Privacy-Enhancing Technologies (PETs) and identify design patterns commonly used when applying PETs in the context of these applications. In particular, we consider the following classes of applications: 1. Identity Management, KYC & AML; and 2. Markets & Settlement; 3. Legal; and 4. Digital Asset Custody. We examine how ZK proofs, MPC and related PETs have been used to tackle the main security challenges in each of these applications. Moreover, we provide an assessment of the technological readiness of each PET in the context of different financial applications according to the availability of: theoretical feasibility results, preliminary benchmarks (in scientific papers) or benchmarks achieving real-world performance (in commercially deployed solutions). Finally, we propose future applications of PETs as Fintech solutions to currently unsolved issues. While we systematize financial applications of PETs at large, we focus mainly on those applications that require privacy preserving computation on data from multiple parties

Revealing the Landscape of Privacy-Enhancing Technologies in the Context of Data Markets for the IoT: A Systematic Literature Review

IoT data markets in public and private institutions have become increasingly relevant in recent years because of their potential to improve data availability and unlock new business models. However, exchanging data in markets bears considerable challenges related to disclosing sensitive information. Despite considerable research focused on different aspects of privacy-enhancing data markets for the IoT, none of the solutions proposed so far seems to find a practical adoption. Thus, this study aims to organize the state-of-the-art solutions, analyze and scope the technologies that have been suggested in this context, and structure the remaining challenges to determine areas where future research is required. To accomplish this goal, we conducted a systematic literature review on privacy enhancement in data markets for the IoT, covering 50 publications dated up to July 2020, and provided updates with 24 publications dated up to May 2022. Our results indicate that most research in this area has emerged only recently, and no IoT data market architecture has established itself as canonical. Existing solutions frequently lack the required combination of anonymization and secure computation technologies. Furthermore, there is no consensus on the appropriate use of blockchain technology for IoT data markets and a low degree of leveraging existing libraries or reusing generic data market architectures. We also identified significant challenges remaining, such as the copy problem and the recursive enforcement problem that-while solutions have been suggested to some extent-are often not sufficiently addressed in proposed designs. We conclude that privacy-enhancing technologies need further improvements to positively impact data markets so that, ultimately, the value of data is preserved through data scarcity and users' privacy and businesses-critical information are protected.Comment: 49 pages, 17 figures, 11 table

What if we could travel without passport? First sight to blockchain-based identity management in tourism

Blockchain technology, as a distributed digital ledger, enables users to control their credentials without being breached by third parties. From a tourism perspective, it allows tourists to pass through checkpoints and/or bookings without waiting and having to go through third-party transactions. Hence, this paper aims to discuss traditional identity management (IdM) system challenges and what blockchain might offer as a counterpoint to conventional travel experiences within th