The Uberization of the United Nations’ regime to prevent the online financing of terrorism: tackling the problem of obfuscation in virtual currencies

This article examines an Uberization model of governance that can enable the existing United Nations (UN) regime for preventing the financing of terrorism to overcome the problems caused by the obfuscation techniques employed by virtual currencies (VCs). This new global governance model envisions a multi-sided platform where public and private actors are interconnected by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). The central argument of this article is that the UNSC can build a powerful and transparent platform of cooperation and set binding rules of cooperation for all countries and members of the VC ecosystem. This governance platform will offer an entrepreneurial opportunity for private actors of the VC ecosystem to allocate their idle investigation capacity towards cooperation with national law enforcement agencies who lack investigation resources to tackle the problem of obfuscation in VCs. It will also enable national law enforcement agencies to collaborate with the most competent private cyber forensic experts in a cost-efficient way.