In May 2019, the UK Jurisdiction Taskforce (the “UKJT”) of the LawTech Delivery Panel published its public consultation paper on the status of cryptoassets and distributed ledger technology, as well as the enforceability of smart contracts, under English private law.
While much of the literature around cryptoassets in the legal context has been centred on their regulation, the UKJT’s consultation paper focuses on the legal characterization of these instruments themselves. In this article, we consider how cryptoassets can be defined using the existing vocabulary of English private law and the implications of this characterization.
There is still no single agreed definition of cryptoassets. The consultation adopts a broad definition of the term as being “often used to describe something which is, or of which at least a component is, represented by certain data (often, although not necessarily, recorded on a distributed ledger) which, by virtue of the design of a broader system, can only be updated upon the satisfaction of specific conditions.”
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