Reaching Assets That Have No Place: A Comparative Policy Evaluation of Judicial Enforcement and Attachment over Virtual Assets and Digital Currencies

Abstract

Cryptocurrencies and other virtual assets have outgrown the civil-procedure rules meant to reach a debtor's property. A creditor who once needed a bank account number now faces value recorded on a distributed ledger, controlled by a private key, and movable across borders in seconds. This study evaluates whether existing legal frameworks can support effective judicial enforcement and attachment (al-ḥajz) over such assets, and what an optimal framework would look like, with particular attention to the United Arab Emirates. Methodologically, it is a comparative policy-evaluation study built on doctrinal analysis: it constructs an Enforceability Evaluation Framework that scores four jurisdictions — the UAE, the European Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States — across five enforcement functions (legal-nature recognition, custodial attachment, execution mechanisms, cross-border jurisdiction, and regulator–court cooperation), using a transparent coding rubric applied to primary legal instruments and reported case law. Four research propositions are then evaluated against that coding. The analysis finds that substantive recognition of cryptoassets as property is now broadly settled, yet procedural enforcement remains fragmented; that enforcement effectiveness is governed primarily by custodial reachability and regulator–court integration rather than by property characterisation; and that the UAE's mature licensing architecture positions it to achieve effective enforcement through targeted procedural reform rather than wholesale recodification. The study proposes a five-component procedural framework and maps its contribution to UN Sustainable Development Goals 8, 9, 16, and 17. The work contributes an original evaluative instrument and a reform blueprint for Arab civilprocedure systems navigating a regulated digital economy.