The Tokenized Economy Regulatory Challenges and Interdisciplinary Responses - De Caria Riccardo, Poncibo' Cristina, Rossolini Monica, Zatti Filippo

The emergence of distributed ledger technology and the tokenization of assets have subjected legal systems to pressures for which they were not designed. When goods and rights circulate as tokens on a blockchain, they follow computational rather than institutional logic — challenging the foundational categories of private law and raising a question this volume sets out to examine whether those categories can be adapted, and under what conditions. Published as the first volume of the International Edition of the Studies in Market Regulation Series, it brings together the work of twenty-one scholars from Designing a Governance for the Tokenized Economy in a Decentralized Era (DeTOKoDE), a research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research under the Next Generation EU programme. Launched in the autumn of 2023, DeTOKoDE united three university research units whose work this volume collects. Since then, regulatory frameworks have multiplied and technological architectures have evolved, yet the underlying challenge has only sharpened: the tokenized economy operates according to a structural logic that existing frameworks, conceived for the physical world, accommodate only partially and imperfectly. Ranging across legal history, comparative private law, financial regulation, and economic analysis, the volume traces the transformation of trust from Roman fides to algorithmic code, interrogates the governance of decentralized systems, and asks what monetary sovereignty means when the instruments of exchange are no longer issued only by states. What unites these contributions is a shared conviction: that rigorous interdisciplinary inquiry – legal, economic, and technical in equal measure – has a duty to expose the structural limits of regulation conceived in the image of the physical world, and to furnish policy-makers with the analytical tools they need to act with clarity and foresight. An essential reference for scholars, regulators, and policy-makers across law, economics, and technology.