Competing Claims to Cryptoassets

At the height of the ‘crypto winter’, with several crypto-intermediaries filing for insolvency and subjected to schemes of arrangement, who owns what and who has a claim on what becomes all important. Meanwhile, Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLT) are frequently presented as a digital solution to these perennial problems of competing claims to the same asset. This article makes two contributions to the literature: First, we show that neither technology nor law solves the competing claims issue. Second, we suggest policy solutions based on a comparative legal analysis. In essence, the law must: (1) recognise property rights in cryptoassets, (2) provide for negotiability based on the assertion of control over private keys, and (3) facilitate the enforcement of titles in cryptoassets by the interplay of private and financial law