The Concept of Control in the UNIDROIT Principles on Digital Assets and Private Law

The article analyzes the possibility of applying Unidroit Principles on Digital Assets to cryptoassets through the lens of adapting traditional real-law structures to the realities of the digital economy. It has been established that the traditional doctrine of ownership, rooted in the material world, does not allow the full extension of the real-legal regime to intangible objects, which creates “legal discrimination” of crypto assets. It is determined that the concept of “control” proposed by the Unidroit Principles on Digital Assets, designed to become the functional equivalent of ownership, demonstrates significant differences when compared with Russian civil law: control is a purely factual category that does not require will and does not allow indirect implementation, unlike the legal and factual nature of ownership. The conclusion is made about the inexpediency of directly borrowing the concept of control, but the necessity of using the Unidroit Principles as a guideline for the modernization of domestic legislation is substantiated. It is proposed to supplement Article 209 of the Civil Code of the Russian Federation with the concept of “control” in relation to digital assets, which will allow maintaining a single ownership regime, adapting it to the realities of distributed registry systems.