Blockchain Arbitration & Commerce Society (BACS) · 24 September 2026
An arbitral tribunal issues an award. It orders crypto-assets to be delivered, restituted or compensated. The losing party does not comply. What happens next?
It is a simple question to ask and a surprisingly difficult one to answer. More than one hundred and seventy States are party to the 1958 New York Convention, so recognition of the award is, on paper, settled. What is not settled is the next stretch: what a judge or an arbitrator can actually do when the asset to be enforced against sits nowhere in particular, its holder may be pseudonymous, and an afternoon is enough for it to be split across dozens of addresses.
No map of that exists today. There are scattered articles, the occasional isolated ruling and a good deal of conference conversation. But there is no comparative work answering that same question, country by country, written by those who practise in each of them.
That is what we are building.
What the report is
Blockchain Arbitration Around the World: A BACS Global Report is a jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction comparative report built around a single question common to every chapter: starting from an arbitral award, domestic or foreign, ordering the delivery, restitution or compensation of crypto-assets, what path does it follow in that jurisdiction to effective enforcement? What works, what creates friction, and what remains unanswered?
Each chapter is written by a practitioner or academic from that country. Not an outside observer: someone who works there and knows what actually happens when interim relief over a set of keys, or an order addressed to an exchange, is sought.
Chapters are published individually on the BACS platform first, in Spanish and English. Once the set is complete, the report is compiled and published with a DOI.
That detail is not incidental: what is being prepared is not a series of explanatory articles but a work citable by passage, indexable, with every author credited.
Where the project stands
Three months after the first invitation, the report has eleven pieces secured across four continents.
The confirmed jurisdictions are, so far, Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, Spain, Malta, Estonia and Singapore. The first chapter has already been delivered. Further invitations are outstanding in Europe and Asia.
We have chosen not to publish the list of authors yet. Each chapter will arrive under its author’s byline and biography, which is when that name means something.
We are announcing the jurisdictions because they are the real measure of the work’s reach.
The transversal chapters
A report of this kind risks becoming a collection of national descriptions set side by side. To avoid that, three pieces cut across the whole alongside the country chapters.
The first addresses the recognition framework of the New York Convention applied to an object its drafters could not have imagined in 1958, and how far that framework reaches when the asset in dispute is a crypto-asset.
The second deals with the practical mechanisms of enforcement: interim measures, seizure of keys, orders addressed to third-party custodians and platforms. That is, the stretch where the legal decision meets technical reality.
The third is an industry voice. It is not written by a lawyer but by a financial structuring professional, and it answers a different question: how tokenised assets are actually assembled today, where the seams in those structures lie, and what dispute arises from them — between whom, over which asset, and on what documentation the claimant actually holds on the day of the claim. Without that piece, the rest of the report would describe solutions to a problem nobody had described with precision.
Why this question and not another
Because the open problem in this field is not jurisdiction: it is enforcement.
On jurisdiction there is already abundant scholarship, and arbitration offers a reasonable way through, since party autonomy supplies the anchor the network lacks. On enforcement, by contrast, far less has been written and rather more optimism circulates than legal technique permits.
It is worth saying plainly: an arbitral award is an enforceable title and operates in personam. It obliges a person to do something. It does not itself move an asset on a blockchain, does not reverse a confirmed transaction, and has no effect whatever on someone who controls a set of keys and chooses not to comply. Effective enforcement still requires, in the final stretch, either the obligated party’s cooperation, or an identifiable intermediary subject to jurisdiction, or a state judge acting on the debtor’s ordinary assets.
That is the gap the report sets out to map. Not in order to conclude that arbitration does not work — it does, and it is the soundest route available — but to know precisely where its reach currently ends in each jurisdiction. Without that map, any proposal for improvement is guesswork.
Open call
Jurisdictions remain uncovered, and we name them here in case whoever reads this is the right person, or knows who is.
We are looking for authors for the chapters on Argentina, the United Kingdom, the United States and Japan, and for the report’s first African chapter. We are also looking for someone to write on the investor-State axis: whether a crypto-asset can qualify as a protected investment under bilateral investment treaties is a question no published award has yet resolved, and that is precisely why it deserves a chapter that frames it before the first case arrives.
The terms are the same for everyone: 800 to 1,200 words, in Spanish or English — we produce the other version — an indicative deadline of four to six weeks, and bilingual publication under the author’s own byline before entering the DOI compilation. Nothing is published without the author’s final approval.
Anyone interested can write to info@bacsociety.com and we will send the author brief.
What it means
That a young arbitral institution has, in three months, brought together practitioners from nine jurisdictions, with no commissioning budget and no consideration beyond publication and credit, says something about the state of the field: a great many people are working in parallel on the same problem, and there are very few places to bring that work together.
That, in the end, is an institution’s job. Not to hold the answer, but to build the place where the question can seriously be answered.
BACS operates a Court of Arbitration specialised in digital assets and therefore has a declared institutional interest in this field.
This article continues our reflection on Internet Jurisdiction and on resolving digital asset disputes through arbitration.
