Technology-based Decentralization and the Structural Limits of Legal Attribution: Why Adapting the Law Requires Rethinking Its Foundations
Year: 2026
Type: preprint
Abstract: This article examines whether the challenges that blockchain-based decentralization poses to legal order are amenable to incremental regulatory adaptation or whether they reveal a structural inadequacy in the foundational presuppositions upon which law operates. Legal systems are built on the identification of subjects-natural persons, legal entities, or state authorities-to whom rights, obligations, and consequences can be attributed. This principle of attribution operates across three constitutive dimensions: territory, which anchors jurisdiction and enforcement; language, which provides the symbolic medium for the articulation and interpretation of norms; and the body, which grounds legal personality in embodied human agency. Blockchain technology and autonomous decentralized systems-including Decentralized Autonomous Organizations and Decentralized Finance protocols-challenge each of these dimensions simultaneously, operating without identifiable centres of accountable authority, across territorial boundaries, through algorithmic code rather than natural language, and independently of embodied human intermediaries. The article argues that this challenge is not merely one of regulatory difficulty but of structural inadequacy: when the foundational condition of identifiable centres of attribution is systematically absent, traditional legal categories lose not merely their ease of application but the very referent that gives them meaning. The analysis engages with the counter-position that existing legal tools can reach de facto controllers within decentralized ecosystems and examines regulatory responses-including the EU MiCAR framework and US enforcement actions-that consistently re-centralize accountability around identifiable human actors. The article concludes that the integration of decentralized technologies into legally regulated domains demands the reconstitution of identifiable centres of attribution, requiring not mere adaptation of existing frameworks but institutional innovation.
Source: SSRN Electronic Journal
DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.6493863
Author: Filippo Zatti
Institution: University of Florence
Language: English
Subfield: Law
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7162260183