Blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) has generated much excitement over the past decade, with proclamations that it would disrupt everything from elections to finance. Unsurprisingly, the much-maligned corporate form is also considered ripe for disruption. While certainly...

The widespread hype of blockchain technology over the past decade or so has sparked a wave of interest in ‘tokenisation’. Borrowing an expression from data security in which sensitive information such as credit card details were tokenised through substitution with non-sensitive information,...

In Jones v Persons Unknown [2022] EWHC 2543 (Comm), Nigel Cooper QC handed down the first final judgment on a claim to recover cryptoassets following a scam. While both the result and the reasoning may seem straightforward at first glance, a deeper analysis of the judgment reveals a concealed...

When bitcoin was released by the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto in 2008, few could have predicted that it would attract as much attention as it has today. It has spawned a veritable host of other cryptocurrencies, including ether on the upstart Ethereum network, which boasts smart contract...

The latest wave of cryptomania has brought us yet another acronym after ICOs (initial coin offerings) – NFTs (non-fungible tokens). Touted as a means to render readily replicable digital art (and possibly other objects) rare and scarce, NFT-mania reached its apogee with the auction of...

The concept of property has always been, and remains, a vexed notion. Within civilian systems, the difficulty of incorporating the basic idea of ownership – surely fundamental to any idea of property – within the Gaian and other schema demonstrates the elusiveness of property. Its...

The explosion of interest in cryptoassets has revived interest in a curious notion in the law of personal property: the tertium quid or personal property that is neither a thing in possession nor a thing in action. This renaissance, however, has not taken into account historical debates over the...

One of the selling points of cryptoassets has been the ability to subject them to so-called ‘smart contracts’ embedded upon blockchains; yet, despite numerous common law decisions accepting cryptoassets as property, until Janesh s/o Rajkumar v Unknown Person (“CHEFPIERRE”) [2022] SGHC...

English academics have belatedly awoken to the challenge to the law posed by the computer revolution that started in the late twentieth century. Inspired by American jurisprudence, technophile lawyers unfamiliar with the complexities of conceptualising property liberally propose to extend...

Cryptoassets, introduced in the wake of the Great Recession (2007-2009), have proven to be very divisive. Embraced by some as part of a revolutionary future, they are derided by others as the misconceived fever dream of naïve technologists who don’t understand how the real world works....