Crypto officially becomes a “third category” of property, fixing the fatal flaw in digital asset ownership.

Key Highlights

• 6, 2025 at 10:44 am UTC Share Cover art/illustration via CryptoSlate.
• Image includes combined content which may include AI-generated content.
• 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.