Financial innovation in the past has occasionally outpaced its regulators. But velocity today is increasingly becoming a tool of regulatory arbitrage. This essay argues that the central challenge of contemporary securities regulation is not merely a temporal lag — law trailing behind markets — but inundation: a flood of capital formation that overwhelms and thereby evades prudent and effective regulation. Whereas earlier generations of innovators cultivated legitimacy through regulatory engagement, today's most aggressive participants can embrace speed as a shield, racing to achieve scale and indispensability before thoughtful oversight can arrive. The result leaves regulators with only two unsatisfying tools: deliberate rulemaking that risks functional irrelevance, or precipitous enforcement that risks penalizing genuine novelty. Inundation can threaten regulatory legitimacy itself, not merely to individual investors, as each episode in which speed beats law teaches the next generation of entrepreneurs that it can. The essay concludes by considering adaptive mechanisms — sandboxes, principles-based frameworks, and algorithmic surveillance — and encourages greater deliberation in regulatory design rather than awaiting moments of crisis.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction: A Flood of Capital

America’s capital is in a race with its regulators. Every few years, the markets produce a new way to attract money, accompanied by promises to liberate fundraising from its traditional constraints.1 Regulators, in turn, face a new and now-recurring dilemma: how to oversee each new approach to capital formation responsibly without either improvidently stifling it or acceding to it through inaction.

In her consideration of this challenge, Timing the Regulatory Tightrope,2 Adriana Robertson explored how the law experiences temporal dislocation when finance evolves faster than its guardians can respond. Her trio of examples—money market funds, exchange-traded funds (ETFs), and early digital assets—traces a repeating arc: each innovation began at the periphery of regulation or just beyond its borders, matured through ad hoc supervision with a regulator, and eventually came to be folded into the formal perimeter of securities law.3 Digital assets, however, remain a large, expanding, and varied phenomenon.4 Robertson’s insight is that financial time moves in bursts, while regulation moves more languorously.5

This essay accepts her examples and then revises–and accelerates–the plot. The central challenge of financial regulation in our age is not merely this temporal lag but rather an inundation: a flood of capital formation that outpaces, overwhelms, and sometimes strategically evades regulatory containment. Inundation occurs when the velocity of innovation itself becomes a key component of regulatory arbitrage. For a conscientious regulator to draft a rule proposal, to put it out to the public for notice and comment, and to adopt a final regulation in accordance with the Administrative Procedure Act can take from eighteen to twenty-four months; sometimes longer, very rarely shorter. Whether or not that machinery of law is dilatory in any sort of absolute sense, the market has learned the advantages of take advantage of moving more quickly than regulators can.

In the short span since Robertson’s 2023 paper, even newer modes of capital formation have appeared, bloomed, and, in some cases, already withered: initial coin offerings (ICOs),6 non-fungible tokens (NFTs),7 special-purpose acquisition companies (SPACs),8 and, most recently, initial flirtations with tokenization9 and prediction markets.10 Several have been celebrated as democratizations of finance;11 each raised billions of dollars before regulators had yet to craft a consensus definition or response.12 Their trajectories—rapid ascent, belated scrutiny, and eventual regulatory reaction13—illustrate a deeper structural shift: entrepreneurs of modern financial engineering can now adopt speed as a protective shield.

The purpose of this essay is to trace that shift and to ask what remains of regulation when it can no longer rely on conscientious deliberation as one of its critical elements. The essay proceeds in four parts. Part I contrasts the earlier, earnest era of collaborative innovation – when industry and regulators cooperated to develop mechanisms like exchange-traded funds – with the newer era, in which innovators might be attempting to outpace oversight deliberately. Part II describes the pair of tools available to regulators: deliberate but possibly obsolete rulemaking or brisk but possibly peremptory enforcement. Part III evaluates inundation as a systemic risk. Although these developments might appear to be mere blips in an otherwise massive market, we must consider whether a single unregulated aperture could drain funds – and legitimacy – from the broader system. Part IV considers alternative responses to new and future modes of capital formation. The essay then concludes by gesturing toward a possible future in which regulatory processes develop that are capable of matching the speed of capital. Or at least of surviving the deluge.

The thesis is modest but unsettling: in a world of accelerating innovation, our existing regulatory tools risk failure by either obsolescence or improvidence. The problem is no longer how to craft the right rule, if we determine that rulemaking is prudent, but how to craft one quickly enough to matter.

I. The Robertson Frame

Adriana Robertson’s analysis begins in an era when finance and regulation still moved at a comparable tempo. Money market funds, launched in the 1970s, took years to achieve systemic importance;14 ETFs, first proposed in this country in the late 1980s, required decades of iterative approvals before the SEC enshrined them by rule.15 Even her most recent examples–early cryptocurrency exchanges–developed gradually enough to permit a modicum of meaningful observation and retrospective regulatory engagement.16

Her lens is both spatial and temporal: financial instruments occupy zones at the boundaries of existing law, and over time those zones have become formalized through doctrinal and regulatory modification.17 Hers is a story of gradual cohabitation, of regulation catching up to how capital is formed in new and expanding domains.

But, in the decade and a half since the launch of Bitcoin, we have already accelerated beyond that frame. If ETFs represent the tempo of Darwinian evolution, ICOs would be more akin to viral expansion. And with that acceleration to such a faster pace, the difference is no longer merely one of degree but of kind. Past innovations sought legitimacy to some extent through regulation; present ones have sought to capitalize on outpacing the rule book.18 Some creators no longer treat compliance as an eventual destination but as an obstacle to speed past.

This change transforms the relationship between regulator and market. In the past, new instruments emerged from a negotiated discourse: industry petitioned for exemptive relief; the SEC experimented and deliberated; and rules matured through notice and comment.19 Today’s modes arise first and apologize later – if ever. They launch with white papers instead of registration statements, gather billions before issuing a prospectus, and invite regulators to “catch us if you can.”20 To call this a “regulatory lag” misunderstands the matter. Lag implies that the law is still following the same track, just a few paces behind. Inundation suggests that the path of the law is at times being washed away.

Robertson’s case studies depict what might be called the earnest or ingenuous phase of financial innovation. The advent of the money market fund, for instance, responded to a genuine inefficiency: Regulation Q’s interest-rate caps on bank deposits.21 Money market funds, which were not covered by Regulation Q, offered higher yields with daily liquidity, and thus had many of the benefits of bank accounts without the artificial cap on interest. Customers found the bargain appealing, and massive amounts of capital flowed from bank accounts to money market funds. Regulators worked with sponsors of money market funds to design bespoke rules under the Investment Company Act of 1940 to accommodate money market funds: most particularly, the amortized cost accounting of Rule 2a-7.22 That rule allowed money market funds to hold their values at a dollar par value, so long as the underlying portfolio did not fall more than half a percent below par. Maintaining a dollar value, in turn, allowed money market funds to offer check writing, ATM transactions, and other appealing services more akin to a bank account than an investment fund. In sum, regulators at the SEC adopted rules that both responded to and enabled the money market fund innovation.

The rise of ETFs has been similar. These funds were first introduced in Canada in 1990 and sought to bring continuous, exchange-traded pricing to a field of investment funds that previously were priced just once a day. ETFs in the United States arose through regulated-regulator collaboration: industry proposed the initial product, and the SEC helped to refine its contours through dozens of exemptive orders, until the eventual codification of ETFs by Rule 6c-11 in 2019.23 Thus, an instrument that first needed bespoke staff approval for each filing has, by rule, become something that can be filed quickly and routinely. In turn, the ETF industry has grown to over $12 trillion by 2025.24

These examples were episodes of cooperative development: each side acknowledged the other’s legitimacy and value to the broader project of nurturing innovation through a responsible process. The regulator’s task was to midwife financial developments, not to suffocate them.

The current story has begun to feel different. Today’s entrepreneurs pay attention less to the substantive content of regulation and more to its procedural limitations.25 Some appear to have concluded that their greatest advantage could lie in the tempo of development. If one can raise capital fast enough, scale fast enough, and become indispensable to users fast enough, regulators’ options rapidly dwindle. The choice is no longer between “approve” or “deny,” but between “bless belatedly” or “be accused of industry infanticide.” And because of key technological advances in recent years, promoters can accomplish a variety of critical tasks very quickly today: new financial instruments can be created through rapid coding; those instruments can be promoted to millions or billions of potential investors through social media channels with an enormous global reach; and payment channels exist to allow for the quick and easy transmittal of funds around the world.

The result is an inversion of incentives for financial entrepreneurs: speed can begin to feel more like safety. Deliberation and engagement with regulators – once a mark of prudence – can begin to feel more like an operational risk.

In 2017, ICOs demonstrated this dynamic vividly. Within months, hundreds of token issuances raised billions of dollars from retail investors.26 By the time the SEC issued its DAO Report discussing the phenomenon, ICOs had already metastasized; any SEC rulemaking would arrive years too late to be relevant.27 The agency’s only remaining tools were ex-post enforcement and cautionary admonitions. SPACs repeated the pattern in the early 2020s, raising nearly $100 billion in a single year, only to collapse under market and regulatory reactions soon thereafter.28 NFTs followed with almost parodic speed, achieving cultural ubiquity and implosion in just a few fiscal quarters.29

We have also seen versions of this dynamic occur in realms outside the activity of raising of capital for operating companies. Both artificial intelligence and prediction markets, for instance, have enjoyed enormous and rapid growth in recent years, prior to the establishment of deliberate and comprehensive legal frameworks.

Each of these episodes has taught a recurring lesson: inundation might not simply be an accident of the digital age; it could be part of a new business model.

To call these developments “experiments in capital formation” is a generously innocent assessment. Some may also be seen as exploits in the cybersecurity sense: tests of a system’s vulnerability to speed. When the administrative state lumbers along at a pace measured in months or years, while innovation sprints in days or weeks, the gap between them becomes the locus of profit.

II. The Regulator’s Box: Two Unsatisfying Tools

When financial inundation occurs, regulators face two broad options, neither particularly attractive.

A. The Tool of Regulatory Deliberation

The canonical method of federal agency rulemaking – notice and comment with a cost-benefit analysis – remains the platonic ideal of American administrative law.30 This process assumes that the subject of regulation will stand still long enough to be studied carefully. For most of the twentieth century, that assumption was reasonable. Financial innovation was largely connected to industrial expansion: new financial products required brick-and-mortar distribution, and capital formation was constrained by paperwork, narrow channels of communication, and physical settlement.31 The SEC, as the primary federal regulator of our capital markets, could thus deliberate about incremental changes over the course of years without becoming irrelevant in the process.

In a world of algorithmic issuance and instantaneous liquidity, however, that pace of deliberation can quite readily be made to look like paralysis. Only in recent years have we seen three forces combine to accelerate financial development so dramatically: new financial instruments can exist as lines of code that can be prepared by anyone with the skill or AI tools to program them; digital payment systems exist to allow for the rapid transfer and accumulation of massive sums of money; and the promotion of these schemes can occur cheaply, virally, and widely through social media channels. When all three of these technological forces combine, small promoters of untested products can accumulate billions of dollars very quickly. By the time a rule proposal is drafted – and certainly by when it is adopted – the market may have already grown or changed substantially.32 So, a rulemaking process that has looked for generations like conscientious prudence by regulators can now be relegated to a regulator’s functional abdication.

B. The Tool of Brisk Enforcement

The alternative is a suite of swift regulatory responses: injunctions, cease-and-desist orders, or high-profile prosecutions. This approach preserves the appearance of control and vigilance but sacrifices nuance. It works very well for Ponzi schemes and other fraudulent exercises, where illegality is axiomatic and well established. But it suffers weaknesses when applied to genuine novelties, whose legal status is ambiguous. To strike too soon risks hampering legitimate innovation; to wait risks endorsing illegality by waiver.

Between these extremities lies a range of softer interventions – no-action letters, staff guidance, and informal warnings – that once sufficed to permit collaboration between regulators and industry on compliance.33 The power of those tools derived from mutual respect: issuers knew what a sentiment like “the staff is not comfortable” meant, and compliance officers translated that phrase into responsive adaptations.34 Today, however, that informal equilibrium appears to be eroding. Our most aggressive innovators may now treat silence as consent or caution as weakness.35 Soft law can wilt amidst the frictions of “moving fast and breaking things.”

The regulator, boxed in, will then have to choose between being deliberative but merely decorative, or decisive but draconian. Neither choice is likely to lead to optimal outcomes.

III. Inundation as Systemic Risk

The ordinary metaphor of “innovation outpacing regulation” suggests a footrace.36 But inundation may not merely be a race; it can also constitute a flood. When velocity becomes a structural feature of capital formation, the failure of oversight may no longer be a localized phenomenon but something far more powerful and threatening. Water tends not to trickle through gaps in a dam – it tends to force them open wider into gushing ruptures.

Regulatory history shows that financial markets can be highly sensitive to the perception of unregulated advantage.37 When the SEC hesitated to classify digital-asset offerings as securities in the early years, some issuers treated that hesitation as an invitation.39 The resulting rush drew in not only retail enthusiasts but also institutional money seeking yield and novelty.40 The phenomenon can be self-reinforcing: the larger the volume flowing through the gap, the harder it becomes to close without penalizing legitimate participants. By the time a regulator acts, the business landscape may have permanently changed.

The risk is not confined to investor protection. Inundation can corrode the very architecture of financial legitimacy.41 A regime defined by the rule of law depends upon an equilibrium of expectations: issuers must believe that rules will apply, investors that they will be enforced. Each episode of inundation erodes that equilibrium slowly but inexorably. The pattern repeats: an innovation circumvents regulation; enforcement arrives late; penalties fall unevenly; and the next generation of entrepreneurs learns the lesson that speed can beat law. Over time, the moral suasion of regulation declines ever faster.

Inundation, then, is not merely a quantitative phenomenon – faster cycles of innovation – but a qualitative threat to regulatory legitimacy. If unaddressed, it risks converting the securities laws from a nimble set of protections into a historical artifact: intricate, once-respected, but irrelevant.

IV. Restocking the Toolbox

Policymakers, aware of these pressures, have experimented with a suite of adaptive tools: regulatory sandboxes, principles-based frameworks, and “agile” guidance regimes.42 Each promises to reconcile innovation and oversight by allowing a limited degree of entrepreneurial experimentation conducted under regulatory supervision. Yet their record so far is mixed. The problem is not design but physics: these mechanisms still assume a steady flow of changes to capital formation, not a powerful surge.43 They tend to look a little too much like easily flooded irrigation ditches and not enough like resolute levees.

Sandboxes, for instance, depend upon voluntary participation and bounded scale.44 They work when innovators seek legitimacy, not when they profit from opacity.45 The ICO market had little apparent interest in provisional compliance; its advantage lay precisely in operating beyond the perimeter.46 Principles-based regulation, meanwhile, assumes good-faith interpretation by participants.47 It falters when market actors treat flexibility as a set of easily ignored loopholes.48 And data-driven “real-time” supervision, invoked by some proponents as a technological solution, faces its own paradox: the faster regulators must act, the more they must automate their processes; the more they automate, the less deliberative and legitimate their decisions appear.49

One might imagine another approach: a modular regulatory architecture capable of scaling in response to velocity. Instead of drafting rules for static products, agencies could design contingent approaches triggered by empirical thresholds (such as the volume, volatility, or interconnectedness of capital). When capital begins to surge through an unregulated channel, the protocol activates automatically, imposing provisional disclosure or registration obligations. Such mechanisms would not eliminate discretion but would relocate it to the design stage, where it can be exercised deliberately before the next inundation arrives.

This vision requires new administrative capacity for federal financial regulators: a constant ingestion of data, predictive analytics, and standing powers to modulate the regulatory oversight dynamically. It also demands political courage. Speed-sensitive regulation will inevitably err, sometimes constraining genuine innovation, sometimes being overrun by a new deluge. But so long as the process is transparent and reversible, the costs may be tolerable. Our status quo, by contrast, appears more like stasis punctuated by crisis.

The SEC, perhaps more than any other financial agency, embodies the tension between deliberation and velocity. Its culture prizes precision: comment letters, staff memoranda, and a careful calibration of precedent. Yet modern market developments may no longer reward that tempo. To remain effective, the SEC and its sibling federal financial agencies may need to learn to operate on multiple time scales simultaneously.

One approach could be institutional bifurcation. Rulemaking can remain deliberate, but it could be complemented by a standing rapid-response team empowered to issue interim directives subject to subsequent ratification. Such a mechanism could halt or condition emerging products within days rather than years, buying time for formal analysis without ceding the field entirely. Other federal emergency-lending authorities might offer an instructive analogue: extraordinary powers justified by transparent criteria and constrained by post-hoc accountability. A similar mechanism for the securities markets would treat inundation not as anomaly but as recurring hazard with well-considered responses.

Another possibility could be algorithmic assistance, involving regulatory artificial intelligence trained to detect anomalous fund-raising patterns or spikes in the velocity or magnitude of capital formation. Technology alone cannot confer human, politically accountable judgment, of course, but it can extend a regulator’s radar. The challenge would be preserving procedural fairness when human oversight becomes ex post rather than contemporaneous or ex ante.

Yet even perfect speed cannot substitute for the public’s trust. Regulators who move too swiftly risk the charge of caprice; those who move too slowly invite irrelevance. The future of legitimacy lies in temporal transparency: explaining not only what the government decides, but when and why it acts or chooses not to act. Delaying a rulemaking is itself a policy choice, and acknowledging that choice could help to restore any of the moral authority eroded by delay.

Conclusion

Financial regulation might in future be affected as much by speed as by substance. As innovations come to market and accumulate substantial amounts of capital more quickly, they gain the ability to affect regulations more quickly, too. Regulators who might have wished to study developments and then to make decisions could lose the ability to remain a relevant decisionmaker. Moving too quickly – whether by regulators or financiers – risks the proliferation of ill-informed decisions. Our regulators should consider a new and robust set of interstitial interventions that can respond prudently to an inundation, without being washed away by it.

  • Chris Brummer, Disruptive Technology and Securities Regulation, 84 Fordham L. Rev. 977 (2015).
  • Adriana Robertson, Timing the Regulatory Tightrope, in Research Handbook on Law and Time 131 (Frank Fagan & Saul Levmore, eds., 2025).
  • Id.
  • See, e.g., Yuliya Guseva, The SEC, Digital Assets, and Game Theory, 46 J. Corp. L. 601, 650–61 (2021).
  • See Robertson, supra note 2.
  • Mayank Joshipura, et al., ICOs Conceptual Unveiled: Scholarly Review of an Entrepreneurial Finance Innovation, Fin. Innovation, Dec. 2025, at 1. (chronicling the rapid rise and contraction of ICOs).
  • Sara Gherghelas, NFT Art’s Shocking Collapse: From $2.9 Billion Boom to $23.8 Million Bust—What Went Wrong?, DappRadar (Mar. 27, 2025), https://perma.cc/N6MS-HK88 (describing a 93% market contraction in NFT trading volume from 2021 to 2025).
  • Jeffrey Goldfarb, SPACs Trigger Bad Case of Wall Street Amnesia, Reuters Breakingviews (May 29, 2025), https://perma.cc/7JBY-AF7Y.
  • Ines Ferré, Wall Street, Crypto Industry Say Tokenization Will Reshape Global Markets: ‘It’s Going to Eat the Entire Financial System’, Yahoo Fin. (Oct. 6, 2025), https://perma.cc/9P25-2PVV.
  • Bobby Allyn, Trump Administration Sues Three States over Attempts to Regulate Prediction Markets, NPR (Apr. 2, 2026), https://www.npr.org/2026/04/02/nx-s1-5771635/trump-cftc-kalshi-polymarket-lawsuits.
  • Mayank Joshipura, et al., ICOs Conceptual Unveiled: Scholarly Review of an Entrepreneurial Finance Innovation, Fin. Innovation, Dec. 2025, at 1-2 (claiming that “ICOs have democratized access to capital”); World Econ. F. & Accenture, Asset Tokenization in Financial Markets: The Next Generation of Value Exchange 4 (2025); Max H. Bazerman & Paresh Patel, SPACs: What You Need to Know, Harv. Bus. Rev., July–Aug. 2021, at 104  (claiming tokenization democratizes financial markets).
  • Oscar Williams-Grut, Only 48% of ICOs Were Successful Last Year — but Startups Still Managed to Raise $5.6 Billion, Bus. Insider (Jan. 31, 2018), https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-raised-icos-2017-tokendata-2017-2018-1 (ICOs raised $5.6 billion in 2017); Peter Allen Clark, Report:NFT Sales Exceeded $17B in 2021, Axios (Mar. 10, 2022), https://www.axios.com/2022/03/10/nft-sales-17b-2021-report (NFTs raised $17 billion in 2021); https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=60215 (SPACs raised $96.6 billion in 2021).
  • See generally Brummer, supra note 1.
  • See Robertson, supra note 2 (money markets emerging in the 1970s); William A. Birdthistle, Breaking Bucks in Money Market Funds, 2010 Wisc. L. Rev. 1155 (2010) (recounting the temporal expansion of money market funds).
  • The first ETF exemption was in 1992. See Robertson, supra note 2, at 11 (citing Exchange-Traded Funds, 84 Fed. Reg. 57,162, 57,163 (Oct. 24, 2019)); William A. Birdthistle, The Fortunes & Foibles of Exchange-Traded Funds: A Positive Market Response to the Problems of Mutual Funds, 33 Del. J. Corp. L. 69 (2008) (discussing the timeline of the emergence of ETFs. The SEC adopted the rule codifying ETFs in 2019. See Exchange-Traded Funds, 84 Fed. Reg. 57,162, 57,163 (Oct. 24, 2019)).
  • See, e.g., U.S. Sec. & Exch. Comm’n, Report of Investigation Pursuant to Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934: The DAO (2017).
  • See Robertson, supra note 2.
  • See Chris Brummer & Yesha Yadav, Fintech and the Innovation Trilemma, 107 Geo. L.J. 235, 258–72 (2019).
  • See Donna M. Nagy, Judicial Reliance on Regulatory Interpretations in SEC No-Action Letters: Current Problems and a Proposed Framework, 83 Cornell L. Rev. 921, 927–35 (1998).
  • Christian Fisch, Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) to Finance New Ventures, 34 J. Bus. Venturing 1 (2019) (ICOs using white papers instead of registration).
  • See Robertson, supra note 2 at 8, citing Michael S. Barr, et al., Financial Regulation: Law and Policy (3d ed. 2021) 1395-1422.
  • See Robertson, supra note 2, at 9
  • See Robertson, supra note 2, at 15
  • See U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Division of Investment Management. Registered Fund Statistics, Sept. 2025, at 5 (reporting assets of 12.486 trillion dollars in ETFs as of September 2025).
  • See Guseva, supra note 4.
  • See Williams-Grut, supra note 12 (noting that the majority of people investing in ICOs have been retail investors).
  • U.S. Sec. & Exch. Comm’n, Report of Investigation Pursuant to Section 21(a) of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934: The DAO (2017).
  • See John R. Wells and Benjamin Weinstock, SPAC Space, HBS Case Collection, June 2021, https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=60215 (placing the number at $96.6 billion in 2021).
  • See Gherghelas, supra note 7; Paul Vigna, NFT Sales Are Flatlining, Wall St. J., May 3, 2022 (reporting “a 92% decline” in the sale of NFT tokens between September 2021 and May 2022).
  • See 5 U.S.C. §§ 553(b)–(c) (2018) (codifying the notice-and-comment process under the Administrative Procedure Act).
  • See Brummer, supra note 1.
  • See Bagby, John W. & Packin, Nizan Geslevich, RegTech and Predictive Lawmaking: Closing the RegLag between Prospective Regulated Activity and Regulation, 10 Mich. Bus. & Entrep. L. Rev. 127-177 (2021).
  • See Nagy, supra note 19.
  • See Donald C. Langevoort, The SEC as a Lawmaker: Choices About Investor Protection in the Face of Uncertainty, 84 WASH. U. L. REV. 1591, 1607–12 (2006) (describing the SEC staff's informal signaling mechanisms and the industry's learned deference to staff sentiment).
  • See Shaanan Cohney, David Hoffman, Jeremy Sklaroff & David Wishnick, Coin-Operated Capitalism, 119 COLUM. L. REV. 591, 630–40 (2019) (documenting how ICO issuers routinely failed to implement the investor protections promised in their white papers, treating regulatory silence as license to proceed).
  • See Brumer & Yadav, supra note 18.
  • State Street Global Advisors, Deregulation Sparks Financial Sector Momentum: Financials Gain Strength from US Deregulation, Strong Earnings, and EU Reforms, with Banks and Capital Markets Leading Performance amid Policy Tailwinds, Credit Expansion, and Investor Optimism (22 Aug. 2025), https://www.ssga.com/us/en/institutional/insights/mind-on-the-market-22-august-2025. Once an opening appears, capital can on occasion migrate toward areas of low-pressure regulation with gathering force.Victor Fleischer, Regulatory Arbitrage, 89 Texas L. Rev. 227 (2010) (providing a theoretical account of how capital flows toward regulatory gaps and how actors exploit differential regulatory burdens).
  • See Guseva, supra note 4, at 650–61.
  • Prashant Kher & Scott Mickey, Growing Enthusiasm Propels Digital Assets into the Mainstream, EY (Mar. 18, 2025), https://perma.cc/6GJE-N4RS.
  • See Brumer & Yadav, supra note 18,
  • See, e.g., Hester M. Peirce, Comment on Digital Securities Sandbox Joint Bank of England and Financial Conduct Authority Consultation Paper, SEC Speeches and Statements, May 29, 2024, at https://www.sec.gov/newsroom/speeches-statements/peirce-boe-fca-comment-05302024.
  • See Hilary J. Allen, Regulatory Sandboxes: One Decade On, 56 Geo. J. Int’l L. 667 (2025)
  • Ivo Jenik & Kate Lauer, Regulatory Sandboxes and Financial Inclusion (CGAP Working Paper, Oct. 2017), https://perma.cc/E2MY-ZAVM.
  • Id.
  • Angela Walch, Coin-Operated Capitalism, 119 Colum. L. Rev. 1645 (2019).
  • Julia Black, Principles-Based Regulation: A Theoretical Perspective, LSE L. Pol’y Soc’y Working Papers, Paper No. 17, at 23 (2008), https://eprints.lse.ac.uk/62814/1/__lse.ac.uk_storage_LIBRARY_Secondary_libfile_shared_repository_Content_Black,%20J_Principles%20based%20regulation_Black_Principles%20based%20regulation_2015.pdf.
  • Id., at 23.
  • See Bagby & Packin, supra note 31.