Control and Ownership of Digital Assets: A Comparative Law Survey

This volume brings together leading scholars and practitioners to examine how diverse legal systems - both common law and civil law, national and international - approach the questions of control and ownership of digital assets. The comparative inquiry reveals not only doctrinal differences, but also shared concerns over legal certainty, market efficiency, and the adaptation of traditional legal categories to new technologies. The chapters traverse a wide range of jurisdictions. Contributions from Germany, France, Switzerland, and Australia illustrate how civil law systems grapple with the limitations of traditional doctrines of tangibility. The United States chapter analyzes the introduction of Article 12 to the Uniform Commercial Code, with its creation of "controllable electronic records". The United Kingdom and Brazil chapters demonstrate how common law and hybrid systems have sought to adapt flexible doctrines to novel technical architectures. The Hong Kong and Singapore chapters show how Asian common law jurisdictions combine pragmatic judicial reasoning with increasingly granular regulatory oversight. The Mexico chapter highlights how pioneering statutory definitions-such as those in the 2018 Fintech Act-proved both innovative and unduly narrow, creating gaps in the classification of assets under private law. The Taiwan chapter examines the courts' characterization of virtual assets as "movable things," while suggesting a shift toward a ledger-based model of public notice. Finally, the chapter on UNIDROIT's Digital Assets and Private Law Principles (DAPL) situates these national approaches within an emerging body of international soft law, where the concept of "control" serves as a functional analogue to possession. Taken together, these contributions illustrate convergence in recognizing that digital assets must be capable of being treated as objects of property rights, while also exposing divergence in the doctrinal and institutional means by which that recognition is achieved.

is a Professor of Law at the University of Bern and President of the Swiss Takeover Commission.

is a Visiting Scholar at Georgetown University Law Center, Senior Lecturing Fellow at Duke Law School, Research Fellow at the Bank for International Settlements and CEO of Digital Self Labs.

ist Professor für Bürgerliches Recht, Handels- und Wirtschaftsrecht, Bankrecht sowie Rechtsvergleichung an der Philipps-Universität Marburg.