Last week the ‘Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’ (OECD) declared it had created a Blockchain Expert Policy Advisory Board (BEPAB). The objective is to give advice and is part of the OECD’s research of blockchain, gazing at how government and other stakeholders could “receive its profits while lessening the risks.”

“We are engaging with a diverse group of experts and innovators in developing principles to guide governments and industry in pursuit of viable blockchain innovation and adoption,” stated Aerdt Houben, Director of Financial Markets at De Nederlandsche Bank and Chair of the Committee on Financial Markets.

The list of members is a large one, 92 by our number, and is originally made up of industry professionals. This highlights many well-known personalities, including delegates from Accenture, R3, IBM, and ConsenSys, and a few less high profile. Both Libra and Calibra are included.

Forty-five OECD and non-OECD governments are demonstrated according to the OECD report. Although on the issued list, universities and government organizations are in the minority.

The new group is part of other OECD blockchain work, which involved a significant event, the 2019 OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum.

The OECD thinks it has a significant role to play because of its global position. “Distributed ledger technologies, particularly in their most permission-less forms, are inherently borderless, making their policy implications a globally common agenda,” stated Yoichi Iida, the incoming Chair of the OECD’s Committee on Digital Economy Policy.

The original conference was in December 2019, and the first order of business is to determine the problems related to an international framework of blockchain policy principles.

The OECD is unquestionably well situated to discuss international blockchain and digital asset issues. There are various other global and regional efforts as well as more topic-specific think tanks.

For instance, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) has been a forum to share thoughts with central banks. The World Economic Forum has assembled several groups and published multiple papers. INATBA strives to be a global forum and was started by the EU, which itself issued a document “Blockchain Now and Tomorrow” at last year’s OECD Blockchain Forum.