Reframing Asset Transmission in the Digital Economy

The Challenge in the Current Digital Economy

By Irene Ng*

In the traditional economy, asset transmission—whether of ownership, rights, risk, or value—is well-defined and supported by mature legal, institutional, and infrastructural systems. Physical and financial assets are transmitted through trusted intermediaries using established rules, protocols, and documentation. Regulatory frameworks ensure that asset flows are tracked, enforced, and protected across jurisdictions.

However, the digital economy—dominated by data, software, and intangible assets—operates with vastly different assumptions. Here, value is created and extracted at scale via digital interactions, yet the transmission of underlying digital assets remains opaque, fragmented, and often outside the reach of individuals who generate or own the assets. Data flows freely, but ownership and value rarely follow.

Breakdown of Traditional Asset Transmission Mechanisms

The emergence of platform monopolies, cloud silos, and behavioral targeting ecosystems has highlighted a fundamental flaw: the lack of an equivalent to asset transmission for digital value. While banking, property, and securities markets have infrastructure for ownership transfer and value accounting, digital goods—especially data—do not. They are copied, aggregated, and monetized without structured mechanisms for users to transmit, license, or earn from them as discrete assets.

For instance, an individual may generate thousands of data points per day, from health to mobility to social interaction. These are immediately captured and transmitted—not as assets, but as raw inputs to platform analytics and ad engines. The user cannot transmit these data assets with consent, enforce rights over them, or derive economic yield from their usage.

Why Asset Transmission Must Be Reimagined

To build a truly digital economy—one that is inclusive, fair, and accountable—we must extend the principles of asset transmission to the domain of digital and intangible assets. This requires designing programmable mechanisms where rights, ownership, yield, and risk can travel with the asset in digital space, across applications, and without centralized control.

Such a reimagining requires more than digitizing existing financial flows; it involves embedding legal, economic, and technical functions into the assets themselves—creating the foundation for a programmable asset economy that includes not only capital, but also data, reputation, credentials, and digital labor.

Foundation for a New Asset Layer

Asset transmission in this context becomes a foundational design problem. It requires integration of cryptography, market design, digital identity, and legal wrappers. The assets of the future must be able to carry their own terms, validate their usage, and ensure that value returns to rightful holders—whether individuals, organizations, or public goods.

Critically, the nature of transmission informs the nature of the asset itself. An asset that is transmissible under enforceable rules behaves differently—economically, legally, and socially—than one that is simply copied or distributed. Transmission architecture thus defines not just flow, but form.

This is the conceptual and technical groundwork that underpins programmable asset classes such as Self-Custody Data Assets (SeCuDAs) in the Smart Data Economy which aim to formalize asset transmission within decentralized digital ecosystems.

The Limits of a Tech-Forward Perspective

In many digital systems, particularly those developed from a purely technical or protocol-driven standpoint, there is a tendency to make implicit assumptions about how value is created, owned, and transmitted. These assumptions often embed the belief that value will automatically follow data flows, smart contracts, or decentralized protocols without the need for explicit legal or economic design.

This 'tech-forward' approach often overlooks the foundational questions of agency, entitlement, and accountability. It assumes that the existence of a protocol is sufficient to support markets, without considering how ownership is established, how risk is managed, or how economic rights are negotiated and enforced.

For example, while decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols enable permissionless trading of tokens, they rarely interrogate the nature of the underlying assets, their origination, or the legal consequences of their transmission. Similarly, data marketplaces built on API access often presume value without clarifying the source of that value or whether the asset holder has any power in the transaction.

To build robust digital economies, technological design must be paired with legal, economic, and social frameworks that explicitly define how value is transmitted, what rights are encoded, and how fairness is ensured. Asset transmission must be redefined as an interdisciplinary infrastructure problem—not just a software or protocol challenge.

*Irene Ng is the Executive Chairman of Innovorsa Group; Group CEO of Dataswyft and Professor at the University of Warwick. She is a Market Design Economist, as well as a serial entrepreneur and investor in data and digital markets. More on Irene at Ireneng.com.