In today's era, a striking trend is becoming increasingly prominent: Tech giants like Google, Microsoft, and Ant Group are collaborating with top-tier research institutions in finance and law with unprecedented enthusiasm.
What strategic logic lies behind these seemingly cross-border or even "transgressive" collaborations? Why is such cooperation particularly urgent in the emerging and complex field of the crypto industry? We believe it is necessary to deeply analyze the driving forces behind this phenomenon and, on this basis, further outline a roadmap for the future development of both sides.
I. The Internal Logic of Tech Giants' Alliance with Financial and Legal Research
The collaboration between tech giants and professional financial and legal institutions is not accidental but an inevitable choice as the digital economy develops to a specific stage, underpinned by profound business logic and strategic considerations.
First, compliance has become a prerequisite for the development of tech businesses. With the deepening development of the global digital economy, tech companies, especially those involved in fintech, are facing an increasingly complex regulatory environment. Taking Ant Group as an example, its establishment of a digital finance law research platform in cooperation with top domestic university law schools is by no means a simple philanthropic act. By collaborating with authoritative legal research institutions, tech companies can more accurately grasp the regulatory pulse, embed compliance elements into the initial stages of product design and business expansion, and avoid major operational risks caused by compliance issues.
Second, financial business is a key path for tech giants to monetize their ecosystem's value. As businesses penetrate the core areas of finance, tech giants must embed legal compliance into the very source of product design to avoid disruptive regulatory risks. Simultaneously, financial business is a crucial path to monetizing their ecosystem's value, requiring the help of professional institutions to understand complex financial principles and risk logic.
Companies like Google and Apple are actively deploying financial services such as payments and digital wallets, not merely for the profits of the financial business itself but also valuing finance's role as the "blood of commerce" in binding and catalyzing their core ecosystems. Through research collaborations with financial institutions like the Federal Reserve and the World Bank, tech giants can gain a deeper understanding of financial operations, seamlessly integrating financial capabilities like payments, credit, and insurance into their own ecosystems, forming a data-scenario-finance closed loop that significantly enhances user stickiness and ecosystem value.
Third, legal tech itself is a vast blue ocean market. According to incomplete statistics, the global legal tech market size has exceeded $20 billion and is growing at an average annual rate of over 20%. Microsoft's cooperation with top law firms like Baker McKenzie, and IBM's joint establishment of a legal AI lab with Stanford Law School, aim not only to optimize their own compliance systems but also to jointly explore this new blue ocean of legal tech. By applying technologies like natural language processing and blockchain to scenarios such as contract review, compliance monitoring, and intelligent litigation, tech giants are cultivating new business growth points.
Furthermore, such cooperation is also a strategic investment in corporate social responsibility and brand image. By collaborating with authoritative institutions to research cutting-edge issues like financial inclusion, data privacy protection, and algorithm ethics, tech giants can not only preemptively avoid potential public opinion and policy risks but also establish an image of responsible innovators among the public and regulators, creating a friendly social environment for long-term development.
II. The Extreme Importance of Finance and Law Collaboration in the Crypto Industry
In the emerging field of the crypto industry, collaboration between tech giants and financial/legal institutions is particularly urgent and necessary, determined by the inherent characteristics of the crypto industry itself.
The crypto industry urgently needs to establish best practices and industry standards. As an emerging field, the crypto industry has long been in a state of "wild growth," lacking mature technical standards, business norms, and risk control systems. If tech giants want to make a difference in this field, they must cooperate with financial and legal institutions to explore compliant business models and technical standards. For example, when Facebook (now Meta) launched its Libra (later renamed Diem) stablecoin project, it repeatedly encountered setbacks due to regulatory pressure, ultimately forcing significant adjustments to the original plan and the inclusion of more experts from traditional finance and law. This case vividly demonstrates that in the crypto field, technological innovation without financial and legal support is like water without a source, unsustainable.
Cross-border regulatory coordination is the institutional foundation for the development of the crypto industry. Crypto assets are inherently cross-border, while regulation remains bounded by sovereign states. This contradiction leads to huge regulatory uncertainty and compliance costs for the crypto industry. By cooperating with international organizations, national regulators, and top legal research institutions, tech giants can actively participate in the formulation of international regulatory rules and promote a coordinated and unified cross-border regulatory framework. For instance, joint research between an internet e-commerce giant and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on digital currency topics not only helps Chinese companies participate in global rule dialogues but also removes institutional obstacles for their international layout.
Risk prevention and control are the lifeline for the sustainable development of the crypto industry. The crypto market is highly volatile, security incidents are frequent, and illegal activities such as fraud and money laundering occur from time to time. Relying solely on technical means is insufficient to fully address these risks; financial risk control models and legal compliance frameworks must be introduced. Microsoft's cooperation with institutions like EY in the field of blockchain compliance is precisely to establish a more robust risk identification and prevention system, protect investor rights, and maintain market stability. Without a sound financial and legal risk control system, the crypto industry will never shed the "high-risk" label and gain widespread acceptance in mainstream society.
III. Near-term, Medium-term, and Long-term Cooperation Roadmap
Based on the above analysis, the cooperation between tech giants and financial/legal institutions in the crypto field can follow a clear evolutionary path, progressing from solving specific problems to system construction and paradigm innovation. The so-called near-term, medium-term, and long-term cooperation, and the specific topics involved, are divided here only for analytical convenience; they are not entirely separate but interrelated and interpenetrating, and should be flexibly adjusted in practice according to specific business scenario needs and industry development.
Near-term: Focus on Specific Risks and Compliance Challenges. In the near term, cooperation should focus on the most pressing operational risks and compliance challenges.
In the financial field, key areas include, but are not limited to: developing crypto asset valuation and risk assessment models to help the market view crypto asset value more rationally; researching on-chain transaction monitoring and anti-money laundering technologies to address increasingly severe challenges of illegal financial activities; conducting stress tests for DeFi (Decentralized Finance) protocol liquidity risk to prevent systemic risks.
In the legal field, the focus should be on urgent matters, including, but not limited to: comparative studies of crypto regulatory policies in major global jurisdictions to provide guidance for corporate compliance layout; research on the legal effect of smart contracts and dispute resolution mechanisms to clarify the legal boundaries of technological innovation; data privacy and cross-border data flow compliance solutions to solve data governance challenges in crypto businesses.
Medium-term: Promote Standard Building and Regulatory Coordination. In the medium term, cooperation should move towards deeper rule and standard building.
In the financial field, efforts can focus on: formulating standards for new financial infrastructure based on blockchain, laying the foundation for the integration of traditional and crypto finance; researching interoperability and risk management frameworks for Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDCs) and private stablecoins, exploring a digital currency system involving public-private sector cooperation; developing accounting treatment and tax collection standards for crypto assets to solve integration challenges between business and finance.
In the legal field, it is necessary to advance: the construction of coordination and mutual recognition mechanisms for global crypto regulatory sandboxes, managing risks while encouraging innovation; determining the legal status of new organizational forms like DAOs (Decentralized Autonomous Organizations), providing institutional guarantees for Web3 organizational innovation; designing crypto asset bankruptcy handling and investor protection systems to improve market exit mechanisms.
Long-term: Lead System Restructuring and Paradigm Innovation. Looking ahead, cooperation should aim at the deep restructuring of financial and legal systems.
In the financial field, exploration can include: a new financial market architecture based on blockchain and smart contracts, significantly improving financial efficiency and inclusion; the theory and practice of algorithmic central banks and programmable money, rethinking currency issuance and control mechanisms; macroeconomic policy frameworks for a tokenized world, addressing the challenges asset digitization poses to traditional macro policies.
In the legal field, forward-looking research is needed, including, but not limited to: the governance philosophy and institutional implementation of "Code is Law," exploring technical paths for autonomous compliance; a crypto rule system under the global digital governance framework, addressing the tension between nation-states and global networks; defining new types of legal liability in the context of AI and blockchain integration, preparing for future technology convergence scenarios.
The emphasis tech giants place on financial and legal research collaboration is by no means a short-term strategic act but an inevitable evolution of corporate strategy in the digital economy era. In the vibrant yet complex and sensitive field of crypto, a triple helix structure of technology, finance, and law is rapidly forming. Technology provides innovative tools, finance contributes risk control and value logic, and law provides the foundation of order and trust. All three are indispensable and empower each other.
Future competition will no longer be about single technologies or products, but about ecosystems and systems. Those tech enterprises that can率先 build a virtuous cycle of technology-finance-law interaction will not only remain invincible in the wave of the crypto industry but are also more likely to become important rule-setters for the future digital economy society. Deep industry-academia-research collaboration is precisely the necessary path to this future.
