Begin with an uncomfortable question: in whose interest has the architecture been built? The honest answer is that it was built, with real success, for institutions — companies, banks, intermediaries. The person at the centre of every transaction was never given the one thing the institutions were given: a registrable, prior, enforceable interest in the asset.
IThe asset nobody registered
When a person borrows, value is created from their creditworthiness — their promise is the productive input. When a person uses an app, value is created from their data — their behaviour is the raw material. In both cases the person generates an economically productive intangible asset, and in both cases that asset is exploited at the point of origination without any registered legal interest accruing to the person who created it.
This is not a complaint about fairness. It is a precise gap in private law. The asset exists; it is productive; it is simply unregistered — and unregistered to the one party with the strongest claim to it.
IIWhat already exists — and why it falls short
Recent principles on digital assets are a genuine advance, but they begin from an assumption: that an asset already exists in some recognised, tokenised form. They govern what happens after the asset is recognised. They are silent on the moment before — when a natural person's data or creditworthiness is first extracted and put to work.
Frameworks for access to credit, likewise, address access to debt — the right to borrow. They do not address the prior question: the right to register a property interest in the asset one's own economic participation creates, before anyone originates against it. The gap is not in execution. It is in scope.
IIIThe fix — register the person as an owner
The remedy is not new law from nothing. It is recognising, in the instruments that already exist for movable property, an asset class that has been hiding in plain sight: the person's data and creditworthiness, classified as indefinite-life movable property, registrable as a payment intangible, with priority from the moment of registration.
Once that interest is registered, everything else follows from existing private law: it is prior, it is perfected, it is enforceable against third parties, and it travels with the person across borders.
IVThree proposals
Recognise the sovereign data intangible
Classify personal data and creditworthiness as indefinite-life movable property, registrable in secured-transactions registries with priority from the registration timestamp. This names the asset class that current instruments leave undefined.
The right to register before origination
Wherever a secured-transactions framework exists, the natural person should have the right to register their creditworthiness as a perfected payment intangible before any credit transaction is originated against it — so the interest exists from the first moment value is created.
Disclosure on the secondary market
When an institution sells or transfers an instrument originated from a person's registered intangible, minimum disclosure to that person is required. This closes the transparency gap on the secondary market for person-originated instruments.
This is not theory.
Through Fidnt, operated by ISET, a natural person can already register their data and creditworthiness as a perfected payment intangible under an existing secured-transactions framework aligned with the international model law — a registration on a national registry, not a pilot. The barrier was never legal impossibility. It is the absence of an international instrument that names this asset class and gives it cross-border recognition.
● registered · perfected · verifiableVWhy now
The method already works: model-law harmonisation is the right vehicle, and the workstreams that cover financial technology, access to credit, and sustainable development together cover every dimension of this gap. What remains is the will to extend the same machinery to the person at the centre of it.