On the Legal Nature of Digital Currency—The Construction and Typed Application of Economic Essence Standard

The study of the legal nature of digital currency from a single legal perspective has the limitation of being divorced from the nature of money, and is easy to be misled by the standard of "legal tender status". It may also lead to the consequence of being partial to the whole. Based on the study of the nature of money in economics, the function of debt recording and the circulation basis of "transparent consensus" should be the essential criteria for money. Thus, a set of more specific typed legal characterization system can be constructed:if a certain kind of digital currency has the economic de facto "monetary nature", it should be regarded as money in law and adjusted accordingly, i.e., to recognize its "legal attribute" as money; the compulsory acceptance character stipulated by law should only serve as the boundary between "legal tender" and "agreed tender".Under this analytical framework, this paper concludes that DC/EP, the central bank digital currency of China, has the status of legal tender, while Bitcoin should be classified as digital asset, and Libra should belong to the agreed tender category.