Digital Financial Assets as the Objects for Remote Digital Investment Transactions: Evolution and Worldwide Experience

The chapter of the monograph contains a study of digital financial assets (DFA). The authors consider these digital assets as a certain segment of digital rights. It is argued that digital rights are attributed by the Russian legislator to one of the heterogeneity of rights to property, which, in turn, belong to the more general category of “property”. Russian legislator as a way of certifying certain rights also considers DFA, in addition to their understanding as a certain segment of objects of civil rights-requirements (OCR). Authors explore a dual understanding of the category of “DFA” at a specific time of the advancement of Russian legislation. Building a digital economy in modern Russia is impossible without deep computer algorithmization of procedures for interaction between financial market participants, including its Internet investment segment. According to the authors, within a period of up to 10 years, there will be a total replacement of all documentary and non-documentary securities with digital analogues. In addition, during this period there will be a final transition to a remote Internet format for conducting transactions with all securities and other financial instruments. Authors do not suggest abandoning the investment technology of DFA. Since this technology is significantly more variable compared to any securities, if only because a whole package of different securities may appear inside one DFA, both by their issuers and by types of securities themselves, hybrid options and their combinations are possible: DFA+ utilitarian digital rights. Authors concluded that the legal nature of DFA is determined by an innovative way of fixing the fact of ownership and the volume of obligations and corporate rights known to civil law to participants in civil turnover. Digital technologies of a distributed registry and the functioning of information systems in which counterparties interact remotely carry out the fixation. The understanding of the category of “DFA” as special objects of civil law, previously unknown to civil science, is controversial.