David Fox

Digital assets as transactional power

If the law is to recognise digital assets as property for private law purposes, then it would benefit from analysing them as composite things. The asset is more than mere data. It is a set of transactional functionalities. The most important of these is the capacity of the person who holds the private key to effect new transactions which will be recognised as valid by the technical rules of the system. Analysed in this way, the asset can be viewed as a specific transactional power over unique data entries on the ledger.