Crowdfunding: legislative regulation of the financing web-model in the context of legal doctrine and foreign experience

Introduction: normative leadership in the context of increasingly more obvious interconnection between innovation development and the quality of legislative framework - that is the challenge faced by Russian legal science today. The citation from the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation (February 20, 2019) describes the situation precisely: ‘all our legislation should be tuned to the new technological reality’. In other words, the state cannot afford legislation that does not suit the ongoing processes any more. Purpose: the article aims to perform analysis and assessment of Russian legislative solutions in the context of national legal tradition and lawmaking experience of other countries. The authors analyze the Federal Law of August, 2, 2019 No. 259-FZ ‘On Attracting Investment with the Use of Investment Platforms and on Introducing Amendments to Certain Legislative Acts of the Russian Federation’, which provides legal regulation for relations known worldwide as ‘crowdfunding’. This term was used in the first draft version of the law, before it was eventually rejected. Methods: the study is based on the methods of comparison, analysis, synthesis, generalization, and the formal-logical method. Results: crowdfunding is a new phenomenon for all states without exception, which influenced doctrinal consideration of the relevant issues. As is typically the case with new research areas, first works were devoted to describing the phenomenon, identifying its features and differentiating it from adjacent concepts. Afterwards jurists turned to studying the most common models of crowdfunding. For some period, academic discussions focused on the US legislation, on doubts about legality of some business models of crowdfunding platforms, and on the application scope of Securities Act of 1933 (USA). With the development of legislation in other countries, there started to prevail comparative legal research and more sophisticated discussions on the agreement between legal regulation and the new digital reality. Conclusions: analysis of legal regulation in crowdfunding allows understanding the logic of the relations development in the new technological reality, the shift of law from strict forms to ‘techno’-constructions, as was the case with crowdfunding, when the form of realization (‘with the use of investment platforms’) became a trigger for legal separation of investment relations. The article continues the series of publications by its authors exploring the impact of technological breakthroughs on modern law [1; 2].