Burkhard Schafer gives evidence at House of Lords Property (Digital Assets) Special Public Bill Committee

Burkhard Schafer, Professor of Computational Legal Theory  at the School of Law, was invited to give evidence at the Property (Digital Assets) Special Public Bill Committee of the House of Lords.

The legal status of digital assets such as cryptocurrencies and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) has long divided academic commentators and national legislators alike, with major legislative initiatives under way in the US and the EU. In the UK, both England and Scotland have recently embarked on a similar process. For England and Wales, the Government introduced the Digital Assets Bill into Parliament in September 2024 to confirm the existence of a third category of personal property. The recommendation was based on a report and a consultation process by the Law Commission published in June 2023 that concluded that certain digital assets, including crypto-tokens and NFTs, are capable of attracting personal property rights.

Professor Schafer had previously coordinated the responses by DECaDE (Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy) to a Law Commission consultations, acting also  as a conduit between our industry partners and the legislators through a series of workshops and townhall events, to gain an understanding of their views.  At the committee meeting, Professor Schafer highlighted DECaDEs work with our industry partners in the creative and heritage sectors and their use of NFTs to certify ownership and authenticity; technology often not meeting their requirements. He highlighted the enthusiasm from the creative sectors for the new Digital Assets Bill which could open the doors to better industry applications of ownership technologies.

Watch the committee in action here: Parliamentlive.tv – Property (Digital Assets etc) Bill [HL] Special Public Bill Committee

Read more about the bill here: Property (Digital Assets etc) Bill [HL] – Parliamentary Bills – UK Parliament

The Centre for the Decentralised Digital Economy (DECaDE) is a five-year EPSRC funded Next Stage Digital Economy Centre, part of the Centre for Vision, Speech and Signal Processing exploring how data-centric technologies, such as Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) and artificial Intelligence (AI) could transform our future digital economy through decentralised platforms.