Co-authored by Anne Lim
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
