Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets (7 September 2017)

The Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets panel was held on the second day of the Annual Conference. It was chaired by Sjef van Erp, Professor of Civil Law and European Private Law at Maastricht University and Executive Committee Member, and brought together experts such as Christoph Grumböck, Member of the Strategy Team of the Austrian Chamber of Notaries, and Radim Polčák, head of the Institute of Law and Technology at the Masaryk University.

The panel assessed inter alia what happens to digital assets after death and how to balance both procedural and substantive issues, touching on aspects relating to privacy, data protection, succession and property law. The main goal of this study group is to reach uniformity despite the cross-border nature of  problems. The Team aims at drafting EU legislation as a proposal for, eg, the European Commission and/or the European Parliament.

Triggering interesting discussions with interventions from the audience, the question of whether this should be a model law or European instrument was also discussed. In the following months, the ELI Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Study Team will continue to explore these issues with the aim of harmonisation. The Project Team works closely with the Uniform Law Commission (ULC) and the Uniform Law Conference of Canada (ULCC), given the inherently cross-border nature of digital assets and the need for uniformity between the laws in the European Union, United States of America, Canada and other countries.