Digital Commercial Law Private Law in the Age of Tokens, Platforms, and Automation

From Bitcoin and stablecoins to NFTs, digital assets recorded on blockchain networks have reshaped the commercial landscape. Yet despite this transformation, their legal treatment has been dangerously skewed. While regulators and scholars have fixated on financial oversight, a crucial legal dimension has been neglected: private law.

Digital Commercial Law exposes two fundamental imbalances plaguing the digital asset ecosystem. First, the legal community's overwhelming emphasis on financial regulation has eclipsed the private law foundations governing ownership, transfer, custody, and collateralization. Second, when private law issues are considered, contractual arrangements are treated as all-controlling while property, bailment, secured transactions, and bankruptcy concepts are disregarded. Through doctrinal analysis and case studies, Odinet and Tosato illuminate how this disequilibrium leads to market dysfunction and systemic risk, while demonstrating how a balanced approach can restore stability.

Written by leading authorities on digital asset law, this groundbreaking book directly addresses these critical flaws by making a compelling case for restoring private law, in all its facets, to its central role in the digital economy.

Christopher K. Odinet is a prominent legal scholar specializing in commercial and property law, with a focus on digital assets and financial law. His research has appeared in leading law reviews, and he has co-authored several casebooks. Odinet's book Foreclosed was published by Cambridge University Press in 2019. He is a Professor of Law at Texas A&M University and is active in law reform organizations, having served as a commissioner and reporter with the Uniform Law Commission and as a current member of both the American Law Institute and European Law Institute. He previously taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Oklahoma, and Southern University.

Andrea Tosato is a prominent private law scholar, specializing in commercial law and emerging technologies. His award-winning and judicially cited research has been published in leading law journals in the U.S. and Europe. He is a Professor of Law at SMU Dedman School of Law and is active in law reform organizations, having served as a reporter with the Uniform Law Commission, and expert advisor for UNCITRAL and UNIDROIT. Tosato is also the Associate Research Director of the Permanent Editorial Board of the Uniform Commercial Code and contributed to the drafting of the 2022 Amendments to the Uniform Commercial Code. He previously taught at the University of Nottingham and the University of Pavia.