Defining Digital Assets
| Author | James Normington |
| Pages | 11-18 |
1 Defining Digital Assets
1.1 What are digital assets (financial and
non-financial)?
In 2018, Forbes magazine reported that a 7-year-old boy named Ryan Kaji
earned an estimated £28.6 million reviewing toys on YouTube, making
him the highest paid YouTube influencer of 2018.1 McAfee’s Global
survey in 2013 found that the average individual has US$35,000 of value
stored on their mobile devices,2 and over the last 7 years it is likely that
that value has only increased.
While many people are not in the same league as Ryan Kaji, many of us
now have a diverse number of online accounts which create a digital
presence. This expanding digital web presence includes social media
profiles, blogs or vlogs, online accounts for gambling, crowd funding,
share payment apps such as Venmo, banking, pensions and investments
such as shares, peer-to-peer lending or crypto-currencies. A significant
amount of value may be tied up in online accounts that is not readily
accessible to immediate family or the personal representatives and/or
executors on the account holder’s death. An excellent example of how not
to deal with digital assets was reported in The Guardian newspaper.3 The
untimely death in December 2018 of Gerald Cotten, a 30-year-old crypto-
currency exchange executive, who left no instructions on how to access his
US$150 million crypto-currency digital assets, deprived his relatives of
those assets. Almost 4 years later, his account remains impenetrable, with
US$150 million effectively consigned to the digital scrap heap.
Within the last two decades digital assets have become an integral part of
our modern life, and this has only accelerated during the COVID-19
pandemic.4 Digital assets are present in our personal, professional and
1 ‘How this 7-year-old made $22 million playing with toys’, Forbes, 3 December 2018,
www.forbes.com.
2 ‘More than 30% of people don’t password protect their mobile devices’, McAfee
Blog, 24 February 2013, www.mcafee.com.
3 ‘Investors who lost $190m demand exhumation of crypto-currency mogul’, The
Guardian, 13 December 2019, www.theguardian.com.
4 Ofcom reported that, during June 2020, adults spent a record 25% of their waking
time online. ‘UK’s internet use surges to record levels’, Ofcom, 24 June 2020,
www.ofcom.org.uk.
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