Josh Fairfield Publishes “Crypto-Counterfeiting” in William and Mary Business Law Review The article explores legal challenges involving blockchain technology fraud.

By Law Communications
June 14, 2024

Washington and Lee law professor Josh Fairfield has published an article in the William and Mary Business Law Review. The article, “Crypto-Counterfeiting,” explores legal challenges involving blockchain technology fraud.

“When someone duplicates cryptocurrency, the harm is easily articulated: the duper has decreased the value of the cryptocurrency, and everyone else’s holdings, by virtue of having generated for themselves many more of the tokens. Similarly, the solution is fairly straightforward. The duped currency must be deleted in order to restore the value of the entire system. The difficulty is that legal rules must evolve in the face of the narratives crypto communities share and hold. In a fully decentralized system, who should be the plaintiff? If a token has been improperly generated, whose property has been stolen or converted?

“Blockchain was supposed to solve the problem of asset duplication, referred to in blockchain circles as the double-spending problem, or in more recent incidents, an “infinite mint” attack. Ironically, it did not. Rather, blockchain created a difficult set of legal problems that this Article attempts to address. The future of the law in this space is clear. Wrongful generation of tokens will be sanctioned by courts with the remedy of deletion of those tokens. But the legal problems presented will benefit from clarification, and the pre-commitments of the communities that make those arguments do nothing to reduce the difficulty of the legal fit,” writes Fairfield.

The article is available online at the William and Mary Business Law Review website.