Ankit Shaw
The law of cross-border insolvency is about where a company is. It has never had to ask legally what is being administered where an estate consists of cryptographic keys rather than factories or what happens when the controlling minds of a debtor are as mobile as the assets they control. In this paper, I argue that the recent cross-border insolvency reform in India, advanced by section 240C of the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (Amendment) Act, 2026 (an enabling provision, whose substantive rules remain undrafted), will fail a meaningful share of the insolvencies it is meant to resolve, unless those rules are built with digital assets affirmatively in mind.The argument proceeds in three movements. First, it traces the doctrine of "centre of main interests" through its foundational European and American case law, showing a registered-office presumption that holds up well against debtors who are not trying to defeat it, and considerably less well against those who are. Second, it compares how courts in New Zealand, the United States, and Japan have answered materially the same question, whether a depositor's cryptocurrency is trust property, contractually transferred estate property, or no property at all, and reached three different answers in insolvencies with nearly identical facts. Third, it reads recent failures, including the Indian exchange WazirX's restructuring before a foreign court with no domestic mechanism for India to participate, as variations on one structural pattern that neither doctrine was built to handle.The paper conclude by proposing some concrete provisions which we would suggest that the Central Government consider as it moves forward with the process of notifying the remaining rules under section 240C – specifically, these include a legislated default regime relating to customer deposits, a COMI presumption in relation to debtors who have no other registered office, and a mechanism which enables India to be heard if a foreign restructuring results in large numbers of Indian citizens being affected.