Research Progress on the Judicial Disposal of Virtual Money: Exploration from Theory to Practice

In August last year, the Supreme People's Court released 30 bidding topics, among which the judicial disposal of the involved virtual money has become a key research direction. Recently, Renmin University of China, as one of the winning units, organized a closed-door seminar on "Research on the Disposal of Involved Virtual Money". Participants included representatives from academia, the judiciary, and the business community, who jointly discussed this complex issue.

At the seminar, the head of the research group from Renmin University of China stated that they have gone to the United States for related research. A judge from the Beijing Third Intermediate People's Court pointed out that there are still challenges in the case classification, calculation of the amount of crime, and identification of forms, based on the confirmation of the property nature of Virtual Money. A property exchange introduced the workflow and latest progress of joint disposal.

An engineer from the Ministry of Public Security suggested adopting a "dual entrustment mechanism" to assign disposal tasks to independent entities both domestically and internationally. Regarding the custody of the virtual money involved in the case, he proposed enhancing security through methods such as performance guarantees, cold wallets, and insurance arrangements.

Currently, the research of the research team at Renmin University of China is still in the early stages and has not yet reached conclusive viewpoints. In practice, although a certain property trading center has signed a cooperation agreement with the Public Security Bureau of Beijing, the actual disposal of assets is still carried out by a third-party service company. Nationwide, the pace of virtual money disposal work has slowed down, mainly due to concerns about the compliance of disposals in various regions.

From the content of the seminar, it can be seen that future research priorities may include:

1. Explore the possibility of replacing the Public Security Bureau with the court enforcement bureau for handling disposals.
2. Increase the transparency of disposal service fees.
3. Strengthen the inter-departmental cooperation mechanism, involving multiple departments such as public security, courts, finance, central bank, and foreign exchange administration.

Under the current policy environment, the disposal of the virtual money involved in the case still needs to be carried out abroad. The development in this field requires both theoretical compliance verification and design, as well as practical innovation and experimentation. In the future, how to balance legal compliance with practical operations will be the key to this research topic.