Dr. Kabir Duggal brings a global arbitration perspective to some of the most complex disputes emerging from the digital economy. His work spans cross-border commercial, investor-State, and technology-related disputes, including matters involving digital assets, blockchain technologies, fintech, and emerging technologies.
A partner at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld LLP, Dr. Duggal serves as both arbitrator and counsel in international and domestic arbitration. He also teaches international arbitration at Columbia Law School and is widely recognized for his scholarship and thought leadership at the intersection of innovation, regulation, and dispute resolution. Kabir Duggal shares his perspective and experience in managing disputes in the evolving Web3 industry.
Q: Tell us about your professional background and how you became involved in Web3-related disputes, including matters involving blockchain, cryptocurrency, digital assets, or smart contracts.
My practice focuses on complex international and domestic arbitration involving sophisticated commercial and regulatory disputes. Over the last several years, a significant portion of the disputes landscape has shifted toward digital infrastructure, tokenized finance, and blockchain-enabled commercial activity. The collapse of major crypto exchanges and lending platforms, the rise of stablecoins and tokenization, the institutionalization of digital asset markets, and the increasing convergence between traditional finance and decentralized finance (“DeFi”) have generated a new category of disputes that combine elements of securities litigation, insolvency, corporate governance, payment systems, fraud and tracing claims, data and cybersecurity issues, and highly technical contractual disputes. These disputes frequently involve questions concerning wallet custody, private key control, decentralized autonomous organization (DAO) governance, smart contract execution, cross-chain transactions, token valuation, sanctions exposure, forensic tracing of on-chain assets, and the enforceability of arbitration clauses embedded in digital terms of service or protocol governance frameworks.
My involvement in this area developed naturally from my broader arbitration practice representing parties in high-value cross-border and domestic disputes involving emerging industries and complex regulatory environments. What distinguishes Web3 disputes is not merely the technology itself, but the fragmentation of governing legal frameworks and the speed at which commercial innovation is outpacing doctrinal development.
In practice, these matters require fluency not only in arbitration procedure and complex commercial law, but also in the operational architecture of blockchain ecosystems, including smart contracts, consensus mechanisms, custodial structures, tokenomics, staking arrangements, and decentralized governance models. I have followed closely the evolving treatment of digital assets by courts, regulators, and arbitral institutions across the U.S., the European Union, the United Kingdom, Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai, and other major financial centers, particularly with respect to arbitrability, interim relief, digital asset recovery, insolvency proceedings, and enforcement against pseudonymous or geographically diffuse actors.
Given arbitration’s flexibility, technical orientation, and cross-border enforceability, I believe arbitral institutions will play a central role in the maturation of dispute resolution mechanisms for the digital economy, and my practice is well-positioned to contribute to that evolution.
Q: What types of Web3 disputes do you most often see in your work? How do they differ from more traditional commercial, financial, or technology disputes?
The disputes that most frequently arise in the digital assets space are, in many respects, familiar commercial disputes occurring in a technologically different environment. They often involve failed investments, breakdowns in governance relationships, allegations of mismanagement, disputes over control of assets or platforms, valuation disagreements, custody failures, distressed restructurings, or disagreements concerning the operation of technology-based commercial arrangements.
In the Web3 context, however, these disputes are complicated by the fact that ownership, control, and contractual performance are often mediated through distributed systems rather than traditional corporate or banking structures. Questions frequently arise concerning who exercises effective control over a protocol or treasury, whether a transaction executed through code accurately reflects the parties’ underlying agreement, how digital assets should be characterized and valued, and what remedies are realistically available where assets move rapidly across jurisdictions and platforms.
I also increasingly see disputes connected to exchange collapses, staking and liquidity arrangements, token issuance structures, governance voting mechanisms, and cybersecurity incidents involving compromised wallets or unauthorized transfers.
What distinguishes these disputes from more traditional commercial or technology disputes is the degree to which legal, technical, and operational questions become intertwined. In a conventional contractual dispute, the tribunal is usually dealing with identifiable parties, centralized records, and relatively stable legal frameworks. In the digital assets space, the relevant relationships may instead be dispersed across corporate entities, protocol developers, token holders, validators, custodians, and platform operators located in multiple jurisdictions and operating under evolving regulatory frameworks.
The evidentiary record is also different. Blockchain records may provide unusually detailed transactional data, but they do not necessarily answer the more difficult legal questions concerning authority, intent, attribution, or responsibility. Similarly, smart contracts can automate performance, but they do not eliminate disputes about interpretation, mistake, fraud, or commercial reasonableness. As a result, these matters require not only technical literacy, but also a disciplined application of core principles of commercial law, arbitration procedure, evidence, and remedies to a rapidly developing market structure. Rich Widmann shares his perspective and experience in managing disputes in the evolving Web3 industry.
Q: What trends are you seeing in Web3 disputes? What developments do you think will most shape the future of dispute resolution in this area?
One of the most important developments is that Web3 disputes are no longer confined to disputes internal to the crypto industry. They are increasingly appearing in ordinary commercial and financial relationships. Courts, regulators, and arbitral institutions are now confronting disputes involving tokenized securities, digital collateral arrangements, exchange insolvencies, custody failures, staking programs, and blockchain-based payment systems.
That evolution is reflected in the work of the United Nations Commission on International Trade Law (UNCITRAL) on electronic transferable records and digital commerce, which addresses how “control” over a digital asset can function as the legal equivalent of possession in cross-border transactions. Those concepts are becoming practically important in disputes involving competing claims to digital assets, insolvency estates, secured lending arrangements, and enforcement proceedings.
In the U.S., courts are simultaneously grappling with questions concerning whether particular digital assets constitute securities, commodities, or property interests, while bankruptcy courts have already been forced to confront issues concerning custodial ownership and asset segregation following major exchange failures. The result is that Web3 disputes increasingly resemble sophisticated commercial, restructuring, and financial disputes rather than a separate category of “technology cases.”
From an arbitral perspective, the most consequential trend is procedural rather than technological. These disputes frequently involve parties, validators, exchanges, developers, custodians, and assets spread across multiple jurisdictions, often operating through contractual structures that were never drafted with dispute resolution in mind. As a result, arbitrators are increasingly required to address emergency relief, tracing of digital assets, evidentiary treatment of on-chain records, confidentiality concerns, and enforcement against pseudonymous or structurally decentralized actors. At the same time, blockchain evidence creates unusual dynamics: transactional histories may be publicly verifiable, but the harder questions concern attribution, authority, beneficial ownership, and legal responsibility. I therefore expect the future of dispute resolution in this area to be shaped less by the novelty of blockchain technology itself and more by whether arbitral tribunals can apply established principles of commercial law, evidence, due process, and cross-border enforcement to increasingly digitized and decentralized forms of economic activity.