The law is being made right now, in courtrooms that many U.S. practitioners aren’t watching. That’s the gap and closing it starts with knowing where to look.
You’re representing a client in a cryptocurrency dispute. The contract is clear, the harm is real, and the legal theory is sound. But when you go looking for controlling precedent, you find almost nothing. No circuit split to navigate. No landmark ruling to cite. Just a handful of unsettled district court decisions and a body of law that hasn’t caught up to the asset class it’s supposed to govern.
This is the reality facing U.S. crypto litigators right now, and it’s not going to resolve itself quickly.
The Precedent Gap Is Real, and It’s Getting Wider
Crypto litigation has quietly become one of the fastest-growing areas of legal practice. Disputes now span employment contracts with token-based compensation, cross-border investment fraud, exchange liability, jurisdictional conflicts, and even family law, where divorce proceedings involve contested digital wallets. Regulators are still debating how to classify crypto assets. Courts are still figuring out how to evaluate blockchain evidence.
Yet despite this explosion in disputes, published legal precedent in the United States remains remarkably thin.
The reason is structural: the overwhelming majority of crypto cases settle confidentially. Parties on both sides have strong incentives to avoid public judgments, including reputational exposure, regulatory scrutiny, and the simple unpredictability of asking a court to rule on something it has rarely seen before. The result is a body of law built largely on sealed agreements that clarify nothing for the next practitioner who walks through the door.
In the absence of domestic precedent, U.S. attorneys have been forced to retrofit traditional legal frameworks — securities law, contract law, tort doctrine — onto fact patterns those frameworks were never designed to address. It works, sometimes. But it leaves enormous uncertainty in the gaps.
The Jurisdiction That Got There First
While U.S. courts have been slow to produce published crypto rulings, one jurisdiction has been quietly building a working legal foundation for years: the United Arab Emirates.
The UAE has the highest cryptocurrency adoption rate in the world, estimated at around 32%. That adoption rate has driven a volume of crypto litigation that forced UAE courts to grapple with these issues earlier, and more thoroughly, than their Western counterparts. Between 2019 and 2025, UAE courts issued over 100 published judgments on cryptocurrency-related disputes, addressing asset characterization, platform liability, blockchain evidence admissibility, contract enforcement, and asset tracing in volatile markets.
For U.S. practitioners navigating novel crypto questions, this body of law is an underutilized resource. Here’s what some of those rulings actually establish.
Physical Presence Still Governs Jurisdiction
One of the foundational assumptions in crypto is that decentralization eliminates geography. Legally, it does not.
In a Dubai court ruling, a Canadian company and its principal were held liable for approximately $7 million in a crypto dispute. The defendants argued, in essence, that a Canadian company conducting business in digital assets shouldn’t be subject to UAE jurisdiction. The court disagreed. Because the parties had negotiated the deal in person in Dubai, the court asserted jurisdiction over both the company and its owner.
The principle is not exotic; it mirrors how U.S. courts analyze personal jurisdiction under International Shoe and its progeny. But the application to a cross-border crypto transaction is instructive. Physical presence during deal formation remains a jurisdictional anchor, regardless of where the asset itself exists or how the transaction is executed. U.S. practitioners structuring international crypto deals or defending foreign clients in domestic disputes should treat in-person meetings as jurisdiction-creating events.
Force Majeure Arguments Are a Hard Sell
As geopolitical instability has rattled crypto markets, some litigants have attempted to invoke force majeure clauses to excuse non-performance. UAE courts have been skeptical.
In one case, a party sought to avoid liability for a failed crypto investment by arguing that the Russia-Ukraine war constituted a force majeure event that excused performance. The court rejected the defense. While the ruling doesn’t foreclose force majeure arguments in crypto contracts categorically, it signals that courts will scrutinize whether the specific event was truly unforeseeable, whether it actually prevented performance rather than merely making it more costly, and whether the contract’s force majeure language was drafted broadly enough to capture geopolitical risk.
For U.S. practitioners drafting or litigating crypto contracts today, this is a drafting lesson as much as a litigation one: boilerplate force majeure language is unlikely to cover crypto market volatility or even geopolitical disruption without explicit, tailored drafting.
Crypto Salary Contracts Are Enforceable
Employment arrangements denominated in cryptocurrency have proliferated, particularly in tech and startup contexts. UAE courts have now confirmed that crypto salary agreements are legally enforceable. This means an employee can receive compensation in digital assets, and that such arrangements carry the same legal weight as traditional employment contracts.
U.S. law on this point remains murkier. The Fair Labor Standards Act requires that wages be paid in “cash or negotiable instrument,” and while the Department of Labor has not issued definitive guidance on crypto compensation, some states (such as Wyoming and New York) have started to address the question. However, no uniform federal framework currently exists. The UAE ruling doesn’t resolve U.S. law, but it offers a useful analytical model: courts can evaluate the parties’ intent, the agreed valuation mechanism, and the timing of payment to determine enforceability. U.S. practitioners advising clients on crypto compensation arrangements should build these elements explicitly into their contracts now.
Cross-Border Fraud Findings Travel
The OneCoin case illustrates something important about how crypto fraud enforcement is evolving globally: findings in one jurisdiction increasingly carry weight in another. A UAE court declared OneCoin a Ponzi scheme, explicitly relying on findings developed by U.S. authorities. The practical implication is significant: as more jurisdictions build out their crypto enforcement records, those records will be cited across borders. U.S. litigators handling international crypto fraud cases should be monitoring foreign enforcement actions as potential evidentiary building blocks, not just as parallel proceedings to manage.
What U.S. Practitioners Should Do Right Now
The crypto precedent gap in the United States is not permanent. As more cases proceed to judgment rather than settlement — driven in part by parties who need judicial clarity, not just resolution — domestic precedent will develop. But that development will take years.
In the meantime, the practical steps are these: first, treat UAE published judgments as persuasive authority worth citing and briefing, particularly on questions of jurisdiction, contract enforceability, and evidence. Second, audit your crypto contract templates against the issues these cases surface: force majeure language, compensation valuation mechanisms, and jurisdictional choice-of-law provisions all need explicit attention. Third, monitor foreign enforcement actions in any cross-border matter; findings developed abroad may become your most useful evidentiary assets.
The law is being made right now, in courtrooms that many U.S. practitioners aren’t watching. That’s the gap and closing it starts with knowing where to look.
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