The stunning collapse of FTX has proven a pivotal moment for digital assets; a wake-up call to quickly mature. It will no doubt pave the way for much deeper regulation—but this can only effectively happen with a cohesive legal theory and framework to support these “things”.
The Law Commission’s ground-breaking digital assets’ consultation paper is hugely welcome with its definition of a new category of personal property: a “data object”. It is imperative that stakeholders in the digital assets world now come together and build on this groundwork to develop and refine this “data object” in law to create a trusted, scalable digital asset economy.