Beyond the ECSPR and Financial-Return : the Regulation of Donation and Reward-Based Crowdfunding in the EU

The ECSPR covers only financial-return crowdfunding-FRC. Nonetheless, crowdfunding goes beyond monetary incentives: reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding represent the ‘other side of the moon’ in the crowdfunding universe. The Chapter, after describing the main features of non-financial return crowdfunding (NFRC) also in comparison with FRC, provides an overview of the regulatory approaches to reward-based and donation-based crowdfunding in selected countries (Italy, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain), showing extreme fragmentation. Special attention is reserved to the measures that each analysed legal system, through general law or special crowdfunding regulations, makes available to protect backers’ expectations and trust, in terms of transparency (before the campaign about the project and after the same about the deploy of the money) and legal instruments in case project owners fail to respect the announced programme. The Chapter concludes by discussing whether best practices, guidelines or rules are needed in this sub-sector, also considering the different features compared to FRC