Crypto officially becomes a “third category” of property, fixing the fatal flaw in digital asset ownership.
The post Crypto officially becomes a “third category” of property, fixing the fatal flaw in digital asset ownership. appeared on BitcoinEthereumNews.com.
The UK doesn’t pass many one-clause statutes that redraw the map of personal property, but that’s exactly what arrived with Royal Assent on Dec.2. After years of academic papers, Law Commission consultations, and scattered High Court judgments trying to make old categories fit modern assets, Parliament finally said that digital and electronic assets can exist as their own form of personal property, not because they’re shoehorned into something else, but because they function as objects in their own right. This establishes a third category of personal property in English law, one that sits alongside “things in possession” (physical goods) and “things in action” (claims you enforce in court). Crypto never cleanly matched either, because tokens aren’t physical objects, and they also aren’t contractual IOUs. For years, lawyers and judges improvised, stretching doctrines built for ships, bearer bonds, and warehouse receipts to handle assets locked by private keys. Still, now the system has a statutory anchor. The law says that a digital object is not disqualified from being property just because it fails the tests of the other two categories. This matters because English law still has an outsized global reach. A large share of corporate contracts, fund structures, and custody arrangements relies on English law even when the businesses themselves are based in Switzerland, Singapore, or the US. When London clarifies property rights, the ripples go far. And with the Bank of England running a live consultation on systemic stablecoins, the timing all but guarantees that this Act becomes the foundation for the next decade of UK crypto-market design. Before this, crypto existed in a kind of doctrinal limbo. Courts repeatedly treated tokens as property in practical settings, issuing freezing orders, granting proprietary injunctions, and appointing receivers. Still, they did it by treating crypto as if it belonged to one…
Filed under: News - @ December 7, 2025 7:31 am