Current trends on cryptocurrency in the English courts

Guest Article by Martin Bartlam and Nick Kosloff at DLA Piper

Cryptocurrencies mainly exist as a form of digital asset recorded using distributed ledger technology. The best known and largest is Bitcoin, where the distributed ledger technology involves participating nodes competing to solve cryptographic problems, generating a Bitcoin reward through the right to add more “blocks” to the chain. The proprietary nature of a cryptocurrency is complex by virtue of its only having digital existence which relies primarily on the protocols and functioning of the peer-to-peer network in which it exists. Cryptocurrencies are visible on a public network through a so-called “public key” but it depends on a “private key” to permit dealings and redistribution of the cryptocurrency on the blockchain. The private key is akin to a password or a pin-code. Broadly speaking, the basic universal characteristics of cryptocurrencies are:

·       intangible nature;

·       cryptographic authentication;

·       d…