The legal nature of digital financial assets according to the legislation of the Russian Federation

Introduction. The paper develops the problems of ontological content of the category “digital financial assets” from the perspective of its legal nature. The purpose of the study is to solve the scientific problem of identifying the legal nature of the phenomenon of “digital financial assets” which allows us to accurately determine the directions for improving the legal regulation of the turnover of digital financial assets. Methods. The methodological framework for the research is materialistic positivism, integrating general scientific, specific scientific and special methods of cognition, among which the dialectical method, ascent from the abstract to the concrete, analysis and synthesis, hermeneutical method, generalization, comparative jurisprudence, etc. are the main ones. Results. Based on the well-established provisions of the civil doctrine and relevant studies of law enforcement practice, the authors substantiate recommendations for resolving a number of conflict-of-laws issues existing in the Russian legislation regarding the interpretation of the essence of the category of “digital financial assets” that slow down and hinder the introduction of this innovative technology of investing in civil turnover. Conclusions. The authors have concluded that the essential content of the category “digital financial assets” is a set of property rights defined in the legislation of the Russian Federation, while the construct of “digital financial assets” is nothing but a new original way (innovative technology) of fixing such rights in information systems. This method should be attributed to a kind of written form of the transaction. The necessity of considering the term “digital financial assets” from the position of a legal fiction mediating the turnover of obligations, claims, rights of participation in the electronic virtual environment of computer networks of information system operators, in which the release, circulation and exchange of digital financial assets, in turn, integrated into the global Internet, is justified.