Evan Miller Evaluates "The New Blockchain Era of Antitrust" in The Columbia Science & Technology Law Review

In this article, Evan discusses the potential antitrust implications of efforts to limit the dominance of liquid staking protocols on Ethereum. Evan identifies these efforts as an apparent form of antitrust self-regulation; that is, an effort by decentralized groups to preempt antitrust laws by preventing the market structures that facilitate collusion and monopolization in the first place. However, these recent efforts, Evan concludes, likely would have constituted per se violations of the very antitrust laws that such efforts were intended to preempt. Evan explains the unique characteristics of this new blockchain era of antitrust, including the preference for self-regulation, openness of conduct, and autonomous implementation of constraints, and makes the case for courts to apply a rule of reason standard to conduct in the blockchain context that would typically receive per se treatment in other contexts.

In short, despite claims that blockchain may spell the death of antitrust, Evan explains that antitrust risks remain present in the blockchain era, and that antitrust principles will continue to take shape in a public forum and in real time; Evan describes this as “Antitrust Live.”

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