Civil Law Challenges in Regulating Digital Assets: Redefining Ownership and Liability in Blockchain Transactions

Abstract

The rapid evolution of blockchain technology has disrupted foundational doctrines of civil law by challenging traditional concepts of ownership, possession, and liability. Digital assets such as cryptocurrencies, non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and tokenised instruments operate within decentralised and autonomous systems that defy conventional legal classifications. This study examines how civil law can adapt to these technological transformations by redefining ownership and liability within blockchain transactions. Employing a mixed-method design, the research integrates comparative doctrinal analysis across continental European and Southeast Asian jurisdictions with semi-structured interviews involving legal practitioners, regulators, and blockchain specialists. The findings reveal that conventional notions of ownership based on physical possession and tangible property are inadequate in the digital context, where cryptographic control and ledger-based provenance serve as functional equivalents of possession and transfer. Similarly, the study identifies a growing “liability gap” in decentralised systems, where fault attribution becomes ambiguous in the absence of a central actor or contractual intent. To address these doctrinal challenges, this paper proposes an integrated analytical model of control–provenance–liability, which reconceptualises ownership as the combination of cryptographic control and verifiable transfer provenance, and defines liability as a distributed construct encompassing smart-contract automation, node responsibility, and network accountability. This model offers a normative and functional framework for harmonising digital-asset governance within civil law systems. By bridging doctrinal theory and empirical evidence, the study contributes a novel perspective to international legal scholarship transforming civil law from a reactive regulator into a proactive enabler of accountability, innovation, and legal certainty in the era of blockchain-based assets.