Digital assets and smart contracts are reshaping the landscape of commercial disputes. In this SCC Spotlight Talk, we meet Kabir Duggal, Partner at Akin Gump and an adjunct Professor at Columbia Law School, who brings extensive experience in cross-border technology and digital asset disputes. He discusses what happens when automated code meets legal intent, how arbitral tribunals can navigate pseudonymous counterparties and decentralised structures, and why the SCC’s emergency arbitration framework is particularly well suited to the speed and volatility of crypto assets.

Digital assets, blockchain, and smart contracts are increasingly finding their way into commercial disputes. Drawing on your experience with cross-border technology and digital asset disputes, what first drew you to this area, and what makes it such a compelling space for arbitration right now?

About a decade ago, I was speaking at an international conference where a blockchain CEO explained the technology in very practical terms: rather than relying on a single intermediary to maintain the authoritative record of a transaction, a distributed network allows participants to validate transactions and maintain a shared record. What caught my attention was what happened when you added a smart contract—the technology could move beyond recording what the parties had done to executing programmed instructions automatically. I remember thinking that the really interesting question was not whether this would transform commerce, but what it meant for the legal relationship between parties when performance itself became automated.

That is what drew me into the area. A blockchain can provide a highly reliable record of what has been validated on the ledger, and a smart contract can translate specified instructions into executable code. But transactional certainty is not the same as legal certainty. Code can execute exactly as programmed and still leave questions about consent, authority, contractual intent, or circumstances the code was never designed to address. As the UK Law Commission has recognized, smart legal contracts are capable of being legally binding, but greater automation can give rise to novel questions of formation, interpretation and remedies. The challenge for an arbitral tribunal is not to choose between “code” and “law,” but to understand what the technology did and determine what legal consequences follow.

Smart contracts execute automatically based on code, while legal agreements depend on context and intent. Where do you see the biggest gaps between how a dispute plays out on-chain and how it must ultimately be resolved under the law?

I see the biggest gap as the difference between what code can determine ex ante and what law must determine ex post. Code is designed to be precise in execution: if a specified condition occurs, a specified action follows. But a legal agreement is concerned with much more—whether the parties actually agreed, what they intended, whether someone had authority to act, and whether circumstances such as fraud, mistake or an unforeseen event affect the legal consequences. The U.S. and Swedish approaches illustrate two different questions at this boundary. In Van Loon v. Department of the Treasury, the Fifth Circuit held that the immutable Tornado Cash smart contracts were not contracts under the relevant federal regulation because there was no party capable of accepting an offer or controlling the software—while expressly distinguishing mutable smart contracts, which can facilitate a contractual relationship. Swedish law takes a technology-neutral approach: a smart contract can potentially constitute a valid agreement, but the code is not necessarily the agreement itself. The legal agreement may be manifested or performed through the code, while ordinary contract-law principles continue to apply.

For an arbitral tribunal, this means the question is not simply whether the code executed correctly; it is whether that execution corresponds to the parties’ legal bargain. That may require reconciling code with a natural-language agreement and the parties’ conduct, determining what happened both on-chain and off-chain, and asking whether a technical event—such as an automated transfer, an erroneous oracle input or exploitation of a software vulnerability—constituted valid performance, breach, or something else under the governing law. The really difficult cases arise when those layers diverge: the code may have executed exactly as designed, yet the legal result may be different. That is where arbitration has an important role to play—not by treating code as law, or by disregarding the technology, but by understanding precisely what happened technically and then determining what that event means legally.

Many disputes in this space involve pseudonymous counterparties or decentralised structures such as DAOs. What does this mean in practice for issues like party identification, service of process, and enforcement of an award?

The first practical difficulty is that a blockchain address is an identifier, but not necessarily a legal identity. An arbitral tribunal may see exactly where assets moved while still having to establish who controlled the relevant wallet and whether that person was a party to the arbitration agreement. Courts have already shown willingness to adapt. In D’Aloia v . Persons Unknown,the English High Court permitted service by NFT into the relevant wallets in addition to email, accepting that embedding the service on the blockchain was likely to increase the prospect of putting those behind the relevant website on notice. In the Ooki DAO litigation, the U.S. District Court authorized service through the DAO’s chat box and online forum. UNCITRAL has expressly identified service on a pseudonymous address as a procedural issue, noting that courts have used social media, wallet messaging and NFT “airdrops” for service while cautioning that such methods must still satisfy due process. But identification is only the beginning: the arbitral tribunal still has to establish consent to arbitration, proper notice and legal identity before an award can be enforced. The blockchain provides unusually strong evidence of transactions and participation; the arbitral tribunal must then translate that evidence into the legal questions of who the parties are, who agreed to arbitrate, and against whom an award can properly be made and enforced.

Given the speed and volatility of crypto assets, how well do existing tools like emergency arbitrator procedures serve parties who need urgent protection of digital assets?

The particular challenge with digital assets is that the asset can move faster than the legal process. Emergency arbitration is well suited here because it addresses the period when dissipation risk is greatest: before a full tribunal is constituted. Under Appendix II of the SCC Rules, the SCC seeks to appoint an emergency arbitrator within 24 hours, and the emergency arbitrator must render a decision within five days of referral. The SCC’s recent practice bears this out: between 2023 and 2025, 80% of emergency decisions were rendered within the five-day time limit, with an average decision time of 5.3 days. For digital-asset disputes, the next question is how to translate that speed into effective protection—an emergency arbitrator may need to preserve an asset, prevent a transfer, or address control of a wallet or custodian, sometimes across multiple jurisdictions. The SCC’s framework combines the speed of emergency arbitration with the flexibility needed to respond to assets that can move across borders in seconds.

Looking ahead, what should arbitral institutions like the SCC prioritise to remain well positioned for the next wave of technology-driven commercial disputes?

The next wave of technology-driven disputes will require arbitral institutions to be technologically fluent without losing sight of what makes arbitration valuable: neutrality, procedural fairness, adaptability and enforceability. Arbitral tribunals need to understand sophisticated technical evidence, manage large volumes of digital material, protect confidentiality, and adapt procedure to how the underlying transaction actually operates—while ensuring that technological expertise does not come at the expense of due process or the human judgment at the heart of adjudication. The SCC’s approach to AI is a good example of that balance, emphasizing human oversight, confidentiality, transparency and the non-delegation of the arbitral tribunal’s decision-making function.