Lex Cryptographia: Harmonizing Property Rights and Insolvency Regimes for Digital Assets in the Common Law World

Abstract

The collapse of the "crypto-winter" giants—FTX, Celsius, and Three Arrows Capital—precipitated a crisis in private law. As billions of dollars in digital value evaporated, liquidators and courts in the United States, United Kingdom, and Singapore were forced to confront a foundational lacuna: the absence of a unified taxonomy for digital assets. Are cryptocurrencies "property" capable of being held on trust? Are they "general intangibles" subject to perfection by control? Or are they a tertium quid, a third category of personal property hitherto unrecognized by the common law? This monograph provides an exhaustive comparative analysis of the emerging "Lex Cryptographia." Part I examines the ontological struggle to define digital assets within the traditional categories of property law, contrasting the English Law Commission’s proposal for a "third category" with the United States’ pragmatic amendment of the Uniform Commercial Code (Article 12). It argues that while the US has prioritized commercial certainty through statutory fiat, the UK and Commonwealth jurisdictions are engaging in a more theoretically robust, albeit slower, common law evolution.