Introduction: Decentralization Technologies in Finance -- Financial Regulation, Political Context, and Technology in the European Union -- Blockchain Technology -- Decentralized Digital Identities -- Federated Learning -- Privacy-Enhancing Technologies -- Self-Sovereign Identity for Digital KYC -- Decentralized Finance and Blockchain in Traditional Finance: Economic Opportunities and Adoption Challenges -- Decentralized Finance and Decentralized Digital Identities: Opportunities and Challenges of Identity Solutions -- Decentralization Technologies in the Context of ESG Accounting and Reporting -- Opportunities and Applications of Federated Learning in the Financial Services Industry -- Decentralization beyond Disintermediation: The Case of Central Bank Digital Currencies -- Reflections on De-Centralization in Decentralized Financial Applications -- On the Energy Consumption of a Decentralized Financial Sector.

This book connects decentralization technologies with the world of finance and financial services. Increasingly, the financial sector is data-driven, with tensions arising between technical innovations and regulators’ and consumers’ expectations. Fundamentally, financial markets are competitive data markets. The authors of this edited book first identify where changes in the regulatory and business regime give rise to novel requirements and needs for these data markets. Next, the authors introduce three key decentralization technologies –decentralized digital identities, distributed ledger technologies, and federated learning. They discuss privacy-enhancing technologies such as zero-knowledge proofs and illustrate the demands of practical applications. The authors further provide explicit application examples to illustrate where and how these decentralization technologies allow to reflect business, customer, and regulatory requirements amid competitive markets. The volume concludes with an outlook on governance and the sustainability implications of decentralization.