Different Activity, Different Risk, Different Rules? Exploring Cryptocurrency System Service Providers' Duties and Responsibilities

Cryptocurrencies are based on digitally signed updates (transactions) to a ledger maintained in a decentralized manner according to consensus mechanisms in compliance with consented protocols. Although being presented as peer-to-peer systems, there are several service providers in a cryptocurrency system. Among them are protocol developers who develop the rules and implement these in open source software, and full nodes contributing to the peer-to-peer distribution of transactions and appending these transactions to the ledger according to the consensus mechanisms. This paper explores the duties and responsibilities of such service providers, individually and as a group, and provides a discussion of whether they should be subject to special duties and responsibilities. This issue seems crucial to explore alongside mainstream adoption of cryptocurrencies