To remain competitive, companies find themselves increasing their efforts to digitally transform their businesses by developing new offerings based on emerging technologies and integrating these technologies into existing product and service offerings.
This is our fifth monthly bulletin for 2020, aiming to help companies identify important and significant legal developments governing the use and acceptance of blockchain technology, smart contracts and digital assets.
While the use cases for blockchain technology are vast, from copyright protection to voting, most of the current adoption is in the financial services section and the focus of this bulletin will be primarily on the use of blockchain and or smart contracts in that sector. With respect to digital assets, we have organized our approach to this topic by discussing it in terms of traditional asset type or function (although the types and functions may overlap), that is, digital assets as:
- Securities
- Virtual currencies
- Commodities
- Deposits, accounts, intangibles
- Negotiable instruments
- Electronic chattel paper
- Digitized assets
Digital assets can themselves be assets or instead can reflect the ownership of an underlying asset. For example, electronic records that are the equivalents of negotiable instruments and electronic chattel paper would be digital assets, as would an electronic recording of a security interest in the underlying asset, such as recording title to real or personal property and the use of tokens to represent revenue streams from otherwise illiquid assets such as patents and commercial real estate (sometimes referred to as a “tokenized” or digitized asset).
In addition to reporting on the law and regulation governing blockchain, smart contracts and digital assets, this bulletin will also report on the legal developments to support the infrastructure and ecosystems enabling the use and acceptance of these new technologies.
Click here to read the latest issue, in which we review the California Assembly Bill 2150, which proposes limits on the application of securities laws to tokens. Additionally, we discuss the recent ruling of France’s Court of Nanterre holding that bitcoins are a consumable, fungible intangible asset.
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