The Jurisdiction of Par: Juridical Singleness and the Legal Identity of Stablecoins

Abstract

Stablecoin laws regulate issuers, reserves, redemption, and insolvency, while stablecoins circulate as technically interchangeable tokens through markets and intermediaries. In multi-issuer arrangements, units bearing the same designation may be supported by different entities, reserves, and legal regimes. This article asks whether a holder’s right to par follows the token when the ledger does not identify those relationships. Building on scholarship that treats stablecoins as legal claims and examines multi-issuer structures, it shifts the analysis to the continuity of rights at the unit level. The article introduces juridical singleness, defined as the condition in which units of the same digital monetary instrument carry functionally equivalent core rights without requiring a transferee to investigate their provenance. Unlike monetary singleness, which concerns exchange at par, juridical singleness concerns the identity of the redemption debtor, access to par, reserve protection, governing law, and insolvency priority. The article applies this framework to Canadian, European Union, and United States stablecoin law. The comparative analysis is supplemented by a structured review of issuer terms and a bounded case study of the March 2023 USDC dislocation. It identifies a trilemma among global technical fungibility, jurisdiction-specific reserve segregation, and holder-neutral portability of rights. The article concludes that digital money’s legal credibility depends on whether its associated rights remain intelligible, enforceable, and functionally equivalent as the unit circulates.