Crypto’s Case Against International Law: How Harmonisation Fails A Borderless Market
- IJLLR Journal
- 1 day ago
- 1 min read
Arnav Singh, National Law School of India University, Bengaluru
ABSTRACT
CA & GSC assets present a material disruption to international financial governance and enforcement frameworks. The CA market worldwide has reached a cap of $3.08 trillion USD. This encourages regulators to impose frameworks for regulation which are territorially and jurisdictionally bound. This uneven regulation gives birth to an empirically verifiable regulatory arbitrage, as highlighted in the FSB’s 2025 report. I argue that this arbitrage is an inevitable phenomenon, so long as legal coercion is jurisdictionally bound. In light of the international community’s inability to harmonise the differences about the very rubrics of this asset, I argue that the only viable solution to prevent this arbitrage is legal exceptionalism.
This paper, first, performs an analysis of the asset itself and establishes that CAs are structurally shielded from jurisdictionally bound regulation. I argue that harmonisation of regulation fails at both the definitional and enforcement levels, and that partial regulation shifts the risk rather than eliminating it.
This paper advances the case for legal exceptionalism for CA as a legally honest approach to architecturally uncontrollable assets.
Keywords: Crypto-assets (CA), Global Stablecoin (GSC), Distributed Ledger Architecture, Decentralisation, Private Keys, Regulatory Arbitrage, Jurisdictional asymmetry, Financial Security Board (FSB), GENIUS Act, MiCA, Kimchi Premium, Deterritorialisation, Legal Coercion, Digital Assets, UNIDROIT, Legal Exceptionalism
