HomeLearnCoursesHackathonsAccount
Blockchain Law: Smart Contracts, DAOs & Jurisdiction
Whose Law Applies? Cross-Border Jurisdiction Conflicts · 1/2

'The blockchain has no jurisdiction' is a half-truth

It's true that a blockchain's ledger itself isn't located anywhere in the way a bank branch or a corporate headquarters is, no single country's government runs or controls a public blockchain's core protocol. But that fact gets stretched into a much bigger and inaccurate claim: that because the ledger is jurisdiction-less, everything built on top of it escapes jurisdiction too. That doesn't hold up, because a protocol is never just the ledger. It's also the people who write and maintain its code, the companies that operate front-end interfaces users actually click through, the fiat on- and off-ramps that convert crypto to spendable currency, and the users themselves, and every one of those things is located somewhere, subject to some country's laws.

A useful way to think about it: the protocol's core logic may be maximally distributed and hard to physically shut down, but almost everything that makes the protocol usable and valuable to real people sits at points that are very much locatable and regulable. Regulators who want to affect a 'decentralized' protocol's real-world impact have consistently found that they don't need to touch the base layer, they can act on the contributors, the company behind the interface, or the exchange that lets users cash out, all of which have addresses, bank accounts, and employees in specific countries.