Meeting of the Parliament 22 January 2026 [Draft]
The Digital Assets (Scotland) Bill is a narrow bill that will define the existence of digital assets in Scots law. It is clearly needed. Like it or not, digital assets, from cryptocurrencies to tokenised records, are now part of how some individuals and businesses operate. However, until now, their status in Scots private law has remained uncertain. The bill clarifies that digital assets are capable of being treated as property within our legal framework and of being owned.
By establishing clear definitions, including the requirement that digital assets be rivalrous and capable of being recorded immutably within an electronic system, the bill attempts to provide a foundation for legal certainty and investor confidence. As colleagues have mentioned, that is necessary because of the lack of a body of case law in Scotland to cover the matter.
The bill responds to recommendations from the expert reference group on digital assets in Scots private law and from others. Their work has highlighted the gaps, risks and practical challenges that arise in attempting to categorise digital assets within our long-standing legal framework. The bill draws directly on several of the expert group’s recommendations, especially with regard to defining digital assets and clarifying the principles of ownership and control, and their expertise has shaped much of the bill’s structure and rationale.
The bill seeks to be technology neutral and future proof, establishing a legal baseline that will then need to have frameworks of regulation and guidance built on top of it. Digital assets are evolving rapidly, and our legislative response will need to be sufficiently dynamic to manage the risks arising from the increased use and legitimacy of digital assets, such as blockchain-based currencies. I believe that such currencies, if unregulated, present significant risks to individual investors and to the structure of our banking system, and that robust regulation will be required to mitigate those risks. The Scottish Government, like other Governments around the world, will need to be informed and proactive to keep ahead of those risks. They are too great and too closely linked with fundamental elements of our economy for us to wait for a crisis to happen before regulations are brought in.
I also recognise that “digital assets” is a very broad category of what this bill allows us to legally consider as “things” that can have positive and constructive impacts on our society. I am sure that my colleagues share my distress at, for example, the energy-intensive nature of bitcoin mining. At a time when we are racing to electrify our industry and transport to try to keep ahead of a collapsing climate, it is horrifying that a great deal of energy is being used to generate speculative assets that can be used to avoid taxation, bypass legislative safeguards and otherwise undermine the reliable and transparent operation of our economy. It would be useful to understand from the Scottish Government what devolved powers, if any, it has in this space to bring in regulations and to diverge from the rest of the UK. I look forward to asking questions about that at stage 2.
The Scottish Greens intend to support the bill at stage 1, but we expect the Scottish Government to move quickly in providing guidance and further legislation in this space to address the broader risks that digital assets present.