Technology-based decentralization and the structural limits of legal attribution: Why adapting the law requires rethinking its foundations

Abstract

This article examines whether blockchain-based decentralization poses challenges to the legal order amenable to incremental regulatory adaptation, or with structural inadequacies in its very foundations. Legal orders presuppose the identification of subjects – natural persons, legal entities, public authorities – to whom rights and obligations are attributed. Attribution unfolds across three constitutive dimensions: territory, language, and embodied legal subjectivity. Blockchain technology and autonomous decentralized systems – Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, Decentralized Finance protocols – destabilize each, operating without identifiable centres of accountable authority. The challenge is therefore structural, not regulatory: as centres of attribution recede, legal categories lose the referent that grounds their meaning. Regulatory responses – the MiCAR Regulation, US enforcement actions – vest accountability in identifiable subjects. Integrating decentralized technologies thus brings to light the need to reconstitute identifiable centres of attribution: not a mere adaptation of the existing normative framework, but an exercise in institutional innovation.