ABSTRACT
The commercialisation of ‘payment-like’ digital currencies in the financial system challenges our pre-existing state-centric legal conception of money due to their self-governing and decentralised nature. Stablecoins – particularly those which are backed by reserves and pegged to a single fiat currency on a 1:1 basis (SCS) – have the potential to reduce the transaction costs of cross-border payments. By drawing insights from a comparison of the Singapore and United Kingdom regulatory approaches towards facilitating SCS as a means of payment, the objective of this article is to consider how the legal characterisation of money under the common law should respond to, and facilitate the increasing use of, such digital currencies as a means of payment. It proposes a substance over form approach towards the characterisation of ‘money’. Under this proposed characterisation, the legal form or origin of an instrument should not be determinative of its monetary status; instead, the touchstone of the monetary status of an instrument is whether it serves as an effective means of the transfer of monetary value between parties, regardless of its underlying technology. On this basis, ‘payment-like’ digital currencies which bear these functional characteristics, such as SCS, may be recognised as money and the functional equivalent of fiat currency, subject to the appropriate regulatory safeguards that enable them to serve this monetary function.
Lance Ang, Digital Currency as Money: The Case of Stablecoins, Asian Journal of Comparative Law. Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 July 2026.
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