بعضی از خطرات نشانه گذاری و بلاک چین سازی در حقوق خصوصی Some risks of tokenization and blockchainizaition of private law

1. Introduction Blockchain has become a buzzword and this technology continues to attract attention from business, government and lawyers. Sometimes, it is referred to as “the cornerstone of trust for the digital society in the future”.1 The popularization of blockchain technology and ongoing attempts to implement it in various areas of life has resulted in the emergence of new peculiar objects, such as cryptocurrencies, tokens and smart-contracts, which pose substantial challenges to their legal regulation. These questions have already received coverage in multiple legal papers. However, such objects as the “token” deserve extra analysis, due to the recent developments in Belarus and Russian law and its potential impact on the overall structure of civil law. It may not only be relevant for these countries but for any jurisdictions that decide to reproduce the ideas reflected here. Specifically, special legal regimes that implement this object into the economy have the potential to absorb current legal regimes, such as contractual provisions relating to specific types of contracts, consumer law protection, security laws and other similar regimes. This potential is realised by the essence of this technology: digitalization of existing objects of rights and simplification of the process of contracting with them. The original subject matter of the contract is replaced by its digital manifestation: a“token”. This is designed to facilitate the effectiveness of transactions by minimizing their costs. However, the nature of rights to such objects remains unclear: are tokens “rights in rem” or “rights ad personam”? In other words, is a right to a token a right “erga omnes” («against the whole world») or not. Depending on the answer to this question, available remedies and other aspects of the legal regime will be defined, e.g. bankruptcy and conflict of laws. These issues are at the core of the analysis in this paper.