Technology and Taxonomy for Lawyers
A lawyer who advises on digital assets does not need to write code. She does need to know, with precision, which technical fact produces which legal consequence. The Swiss rules on segregation in a custodian's bankruptcy turn on who holds a private key and whether a wallet can be attributed to a client. Singapore's licensing perimeter turns on whether a service "deals in" or "facilitates the exchange of" a digital payment token, which in turn depends on whether the provider ever has possession or control of the token. A tax authority asking whether a staking reward is income needs to know what a validator does and when the reward becomes disposable. Every one of those questions is a technical question first.
This Part therefore does two things. It explains the technology of distributed ledgers at the level of detail a practitioner needs and then stops. It does not explain elliptic-curve mathematics or Byzantine fault tolerance beyond the point at which a legal consequence follows. Then it sets out the taxonomies through which Swiss and Singapore law sort tokens into categories, compares them with the European Union's MiCA categories that the reader's counterparties will use, and works through the hard cases that every classification exercise eventually meets. Stablecoins, tokenised real-world assets, decentralised finance and decentralised autonomous organisations each receive a chapter of their own because each raises a distinct cluster of technical facts with legal weight.
The regulatory and private-law consequences themselves are dealt with in Parts D, E, J and K. Where this Part states a legal rule, it does so to show why the technical fact matters and then cross-refers. A reader who already knows the technology may skip to Chapter III. A reader who already knows the taxonomies but has never followed a transaction through a block explorer should read Chapter I with particular care, because that is where most advisory mistakes originate.
The glossary in Chapter VIII collects every technical term used in the book. Terms defined there appear in the running text without further explanation once they have been introduced.
For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of October 2026.