Metaverse Bar Association

Public-market disclosure brings closer scrutiny of custody, compliance, regulatory exposure, volatility, customer protection, and how the company manages digital asset risk. Article Link: reuters.com/legal/governme…

Blockchain.com has confidentially filed for a U.S. IPO, adding to the signs that digital asset companies are testing public markets again. A crypto company going public has to explain its business in a very different legal environment than the last major crypto cycle.

Article Link: theguardian.com/technology/202…

The debate is moving away from a simple “ban or no ban” question and toward platform design. Features such as infinite scroll, disappearing messages, push notifications, recommender systems, and age verification are becoming central to online safety regulation.

UK online safety campaigners are urging the government to restrict under-16s from using social media platforms unless those platforms meet safety standards.

That raises familiar legal questions in a new format: investor rights, custody, voting, dividends, market manipulation, disclosure, and whether token holders truly receive the same protections as ordinary shareholders. Article Link: investors.com/news/crypto-to…

U.S. regulators are reportedly slowing down a proposal that would let crypto firms offer tokenized versions of public company shares. Tokenized stocks would bring traditional securities into blockchain-based trading environments.

Encryption, metadata, access, backups, and internal controls can all matter when regulators test whether a company’s privacy statements are accurate. Article Link: reuters.com/legal/governme…

Texas is suing Meta and WhatsApp over claims that WhatsApp misled users about the privacy and security of its encrypted messaging service. The case is about what a platform tells users, what the technology actually does, and how privacy claims are understood by the public.

Article Link: dfs.ny.gov/industry-guida…

The advisory is aimed at regulated financial institutions, but the lesson is broader for legal and compliance teams advising on AI adoption. Advanced AI tools are becoming part of cyber risk, vendor risk, governance, and incident response planning.

New York’s financial regulator is warning financial institutions that frontier AI models may increase cybersecurity risk because they can help identify software vulnerabilities and exploits faster and at greater scale.

Article Link: reuters.com/legal/legalind…

The legal question is how much transparency regulators can require without forcing companies to reveal commercially sensitive AI development information. The fight shows how quickly AI governance is becoming a dispute about evidence, disclosure and competitive advantage.

California’s AI training-data law is already being tested in court, with X.AI arguing that forced disclosure could expose trade secrets while regulators push for more transparency around how generative AI systems are built and trained.

Online safety obligations are increasingly being applied to synthetic media as part of platform governance, not as a separate technology problem. Article Link: theguardian.com/technology/202…

The new codes of practice are expected to require stronger detection and removal systems, including hash-matching technology. The compliance issue is whether platforms can identify and remove harmful AI-generated content quickly enough to satisfy regulators.

Ofcom is tightening expectations for platforms dealing with intimate image abuse and AI-generated deepfakes, making synthetic content a live compliance issue for social media platforms, messaging services and online forums that host or transmit user-generated content.