Articles by author
UK Jurisdiction Taskforce publishes Report on Control of Digital Assets
This article reviews the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce’s Report on Control of Digital Assets (the Report). Certain digital assets fall into the new third category of property enabled by the entry into force of the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025. For these digital assets, “control” is a key concept, analogous to possession for tangible property. The Report is a factual reference describing control intended for use by legal practitioners to develop legal rules governing digital assets. It highlights distinctions between control of traditional accounts and control of blockchain-based assets. Building on this distinction, it lists various modes of control, such as shared and delegated control and control via smart contracts, through the addition of successive layers of complexity.
25 JUN 2026What sort of property is a cryptoasset?
There is now an emerging consensus that cryptoassets are property – judges have so held in cases in England and other jurisdictions and it is the unanimous conclusion of independent reports on the topic.1 But what sort of property? The category of property into which cryptoassets are placed has wide implications in areas such as insolvency, security and tax. Two rival schools of thought have developed and the ongoing confusion has led to legal uncertainty. In this article, we argue for the correct categorisation based on a principled explanation of why different categories of property exist and how they apply to cryptoassets.
1 FEB 2021
