A Lawful Framework for Distributed Electronic Markets

While decentralized peer-to-peer market platforms are more suited for trading short-lived or non-material goods (e.g., electrical power, bandwidth-on-demand) due to reduced transaction cost, robustness and scalability, they lack the legal certainty provided by centralized electronic market places operated by a trusted third party. This paper presents a technical framework that, conforming to European regulations, provides legal certainty for distributed market platforms. The framework includes a market-consistent data model representing the facts for the legal subsumption process, maps the European framework for electronic signatures to a distributed system, and comprises solutions for both adducing the reception of electronic documents and their distributed long-time storage. Moreover, it includes an electronic legal adviser for an automatic verification of contracts.