On 20 January 2026, the Edwin Coe Digital Assets Roundtable brought together legal and industry leaders to examine data trusts, data tokenisation, market infrastructure and the implications of the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025. 

Hosted by Laura Clatworthy, Partner and Head of Digital Assets at Edwin Coe, alongside Helen Disney, CEO of Unblocked, and moderated by Jonny Fry, CEO of Team Blockchain, the discussion illustrated how legal certainty, trusted governance and robust infrastructure are converging to support the next phase of the digital asset economy.

A central theme was the evolution of data trusts from policy concept to commercially viable structures. James Kingston, Director of DAO SPV, explained that early initiatives struggled due to uncertainty around ownership and commercialisation, but recent developments in Jersey and the Isle of Man have materially shifted the landscape. “What these offshore structures have done differently is tightly bind ownership to use , it’s almost a data use-rights trust,” he said, noting that this linkage avoids the liquidity failures seen in other jurisdictions and makes data assets operational rather than theoretical.

The legal foundations underpinning this shift were explored through the lens of the Property (Digital Assets etc) Act 2025 (the “Act”). Sarah Green MCIArb, former Law Commissioner, explained that the Act addresses a long-standing disconnect between how digital assets function and how the law historically categorised them. “The distinguishing feature is rivalrousness; a single point of control, use and disposal” she explained. “If a digital asset has that quality, it should not be denied property protection simply because it doesn’t fit neatly into existing legal boxes.” The Act, she emphasised, is facilitative, allowing the common law to develop rather than prescribing outcomes.

Seema Khinda-Johnson, Co-Founder of Nuggets, focused on how trusted data infrastructure is being operationalised, particularly through agents and machine-driven decision-making. “What we are seeing now is the commercial deployment of trusted agents accessing data in real time,” she said, identifying consented personal data, high-value operational data, regulated decision-making data and synthetic or derived data as key emerging asset classes. She stressed that monetisation depends on enforceable guardrails. “Governance alone isn’t enough. You need identity, consent, provenance and auditability embedded at execution, especially when machines, not humans, are accessing the data.”

Christopher Pollard, Legal Director at Edwin Coe, provided an important balance by grounding the discussion in the limits of English law. “It is fundamental that you cannot own data under English law, you can only control it” he said, emphasising that value is derived through contracts, structure and stewardship rather than property rights. While tokenisation may improve access and transparency, Pollard cautioned that regulatory constraints remain, particularly around personal data and anonymisation, where commercial usefulness and compliance do not always align.

Laura Clatworthy observed that many businesses are sitting on vast amounts of unstructured data, often without clarity on provenance or consent. “Tokenisation gives data structure, data trusts give it governance, together they provide the ability for consented and controlled sharing of data, and the potential to unlock real-world commercial use cases for data at scale.” 

From an infrastructure and commercialisation perspective, the roundtable highlighted how legal certainty enables market-grade systems to emerge. Clare Weaver, Head of Regulatory & Legal at ClearToken, described the importance of post-trade risk mitigation and settlement finality for institutional adoption. “Until the 2025 Act came into force, user rights and property rights didn’t properly align… Now we can deliver legal certainty and insolvency protection. That is what allows digital assets, including tokenised data structures, to function safely within the financial system.” She explained that ClearToken exists because there are no other full infrastructure players on a horizontal level that they are aware of in the digital assets world today and that they are, with support from the Bank of England, the Treasury and the FCA, creating a clearing house. Clare underscored that English common law is critical because uniquely it provides settlement finality and bankruptcy remoteness. “Without that certainty digital assets, including tokenised data structures , simply cannot operate safely at scale.”