Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 receives royal assent, becoming law as Parliament confirms “third category” of personal property

The Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 has received Royal Assent on 2 December 2025, setting in statute that digital assets can attract personal property rights even though they do not fit into traditional legal categories.

The Act states that a thing is not prevented from being the object of personal property rights merely because it is neither a “thing in possession” nor a “thing in action”. This confirms the existence of a third category of personal property in a legal framework that is designed to accommodate assets such as crypto-tokens, stablecoins, and other digitally native objects.

For more than five years, the Law Commission and the UK’s judiciary have expressed a need to modernise how the law treats digital assets. The Act, which represents the culmination of that work, gives legal form to the idea that digital assets can be owned, transferred, collateralised, and litigated with the same clarity and enforceability expected of more familiar forms of property.

The Act does not attempt to define the precise boundaries of this third category. Instead, it empowers courts to develop the doctrine pragmatically as technology evolves. That flexibility is widely seen as a deliberate design choice intended to keep the jurisdiction competitive.

The legislation builds on a series of judicial decisions. In the UK’s first fully contested crypto-asset trial, D’Aloia v Persons Unknown (2024), the High Court acknowledged that digital assets can attract property rights under English law. This Act has now formalised that concept. 

The new Act sits within the UK government’s wider programme to position the country as a global centre for digital finance. It complements the Digital Securities Sandbox, stablecoin regulation efforts, emerging work on the digital pound, and the competitiveness agenda under the Financial Services Growth and Competitiveness Strategy.

While the Act is short (only two sections covering the recognition of objects and commencement), it has substantial significance, creating the legal basis upon which future digital-asset markets, tokenised finance models, and blockchain-enabled commercial activity can be built.

Update: We originally published this story under the headline “UK’s Property (Digital Assets etc) Act becomes law as Parliament confirms “third category” of personal property“. The act, however, is not for the UK, but rather only England and Wales and Northern Ireland. Scotland (which is the 4th constituent country in the UK) is currently in the process of passing its own similar legislation.