You are cordially invited to the seminar organised by Bilkent University Faculty of Law.
“Harnessing Blockchain Technology for Sustainable Taxation”
Dr. N. Nilay Dayanç Kuzeyli
University of Antwerp, Faculty of Law
27 May 2025, Tuesday – 15:00
Art Gallery, Main Campus Library
The seminar will be held in English.
World leaders and intergovernmental institutions like the United Nations, OECD, IMF, World Bank, and European Union all recognized the need to use taxation for sustainability purposes, but they have mostly focused on carbon taxes and carbon pricing regimes. At the same time, researchers have been developing innovative proposals on how to make tax systems more sustainable by using economic methodologies that account for various negative environmental and social externalities in production, investment, and consumption. Notably, recent publications have introduced a novel technical tax framework that integrates life-cycle analysis (LCA) methodologies. LCAs and other sustainability assessment tools are widely used by environmental economists to quantify the impacts of products and activities throughout their life cycle, from production to disposal. Applying these insights to income tax systems, offers a way to internalize the environmental and social costs of economic activity. While the implementation of these approaches holds promise for fostering a greener, resource-efficient, and climate-neutral economy, they face a formidable practical challenge: the need to collect, process, and share substantial volumes of data related to externalized costs throughout the lifecycle of products and services and along supply chains. This is where blockchain technology- ambitiously positioned as a tool for trust, traceability, and transparency- offers transformative potential. Accordingly, the seminar investigates how blockchain technology may contribute to making sustainable taxation not only a normative goal, but also a practical reality.
N. Nilay Dayanç Kuzeyli is currently an affiliated post-doctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She also teaches digital services taxes in the summer program at the University of Lisbon, where she conducts research on the regulatory role of digital services taxes. In addition, she serves as a part-time lecturer in tax law at İ.D. Bilkent University, Turkey. She began her legal career as a lawyer at a construction firm after graduation and has been practicing law ever since. Previously, she completed a post-doctoral fellowship as a Hauser Global Fellow at NYU School of Law, where her research focused on the tax implications of blockchain technology and its potential to transform tax systems. While at NYU, she also initiated a new project titled “CBDC Design for Taxation”. Nilay is a founding member of the World Bank’s working group on crypto taxation and digital transformation where she contributes to the preparation of issue notes and training programs for developing economies. She also leads a national working group under the Turkish Ministry of Treasury and Finance’s Tax Council, where she focuses on minimizing VAT gap by integrating emerging technologies into tax administration. Her research lies at the intersection of blockchain technology, taxation, and sustainability, and her recent project was awarded the Seal of Excellence by the European Commission’s Horizon Europe program. Nilay is also an active member of the Blockchain Türkiye Platform since 2019, where she contributed as a reporter to a comprehensive report on the taxation of crypto assets. She holds a law degree from Bilkent University (2010), as well as an LL.M. in Law and Economics and a Ph.D. in Public Law (2019), both from İ.D. Bilkent University. She is the author of several books, book chapters and peer-reviewed articles on tax law, digital transformation of tax administrations, environmental taxes, NFT taxation, legal nature of crypto assets and emerging income tax issues related to crypto assets.