Commodities in Focus Weekly - Digital assets and the (official) dawn of the third category of personal property
The Property (Digital Assets etc) Bill (the Bill), introduced on 11 September 2024, addresses a long-standing lack of certainty regarding the legal treatment of 'digital assets' under the laws of England and Wales, and once and for all upends the traditional binary approach to personal property.
The past few years have seen an exponential growth in 'digital assets'. These range from cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin to non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and carbon credits, although given the flexibility of the term, a humble pdf file or email could also be categorised as a digital asset.
The commercial uptake in many forms of digital assets as new commodity classes has had to contend with laws of property developed over hundreds of years in the context of tangible physical goods, leaving the legal status of intangible digital assets in a grey area which the Bill seeks to address.
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