Why I Wrote Digital Assets

The reference I needed did not exist, so I created one

By Jorge Constantino Colindres · Il Commercialista · July 2026

Every hard problem that has crossed my desk at the Roatán Financial Services Authority eventually collapses into one deceptively simple question: what does the holder of a digital asset actually own? A thing, held by control and good against the world, or a promise, good against an issuer for exactly as long as the issuer stands? That single distinction decides who lifts their assets out of a failed custodian’s estate and who joins the line of unsecured creditors. It decides whether a token is booked as a financial asset or an intangible. It decides, under the Basel standard now in force, how much of a bank’s own capital stands behind every dollar of exposure. To build a financial centre, I needed a reference that followed that question all the way through. So I wrote it.

What Roatán taught me

The Roatán International Financial Centre launched in 2022, on constitutional foundations Honduras laid in 2013. We turned legal text into a functioning market: the Roatán Financial Services Authority, two financial regulations: Próspera Financial Regulation A and Próspera FinTech Regulation A, and twenty-five administrative actions running from licensing and liquidity standards to liquidation procedures. Our first challenge was recognition, and it taught us the lesson on which everything since has rested: a new centre’s licences are worth only as much as the willingness of foreign regulators, banks and financial service providers to deal with the entities that hold them.

By 2024 we had learned it, and we pivoted. With the support of Danel Calvillo, who assumed the role of Director of Financial Supervision, we redesigned the centre for global interoperability: definitions that track those of the major jurisdictions, an accounting framework that accepts both IFRS and US GAAP, and licensed entities connected to several of the same financial rails that serve the established centres. The market answered. Between 2024 and 2026 we admitted a first generation of banks, fintech providers, brokers, custodians, money transmitters, non-banking lenders and trust companies, and today financial institutions across more than a dozen jurisdictions interact with RFSA-licensed entities. Every one of those design choices rested on a unified view of property law, regulation, accounting and bank capital. This book is that view, written down.

Two questions, honoured to the end

The method fits in a sentence: ask what the holder owns, ask which rulebook governs, and the accounting, the capital and the insolvency outcome follow. The two questions are independent, which is why one token can be a plain object of property in the first framework and a closely supervised instrument in the second, and why a single flat list of “crypto assets” was never going to work. On those two questions the book builds a taxonomy of ten categories in five families, from native protocol tokens and payment stablecoins to tokenised securities, NFTs, fiscal tokens and central bank digital currencies, and traces each category through nineteen jurisdictions and the global standard setters, with the operative definitions quoted verbatim, ready for an opinion, a filing or a rulebook.

I finished the book with three readers in mind. The practitioner: the lawyer who must classify an asset, perfect a security interest over it, or recover it in an insolvency, and the accountant who must decide how the same asset is recognised, measured and audited. The regulator or policymaker: whoever must catalyse a digital asset market, or apply prudential standards to banks exposed to one, and needs an architecture that adapts locally without losing access to global markets. And the Honduran student of law, finance, accounting, business or technology, because the vocabulary of the global digital economy should be teachable at home, in the country that has already built with it.

Why now

The law of this field changed more in the last eighteen months than in the previous decade. The Basel cryptoasset standard, SCO60, took effect on 1 January 2026. The SEC’s Release 33-11412 became operative guidance in March, with the CLARITY Act still pending. The GENIUS Act rewrote where a payment stablecoin holder stands in an insolvency. US GAAP now carries qualifying crypto assets at fair value through earnings, while IFRS holds the ordinary holder to the intangibles model. The book states the law as at 1 July 2026, across an asset class of roughly USD 2.3 trillion, and it closes the way I will close here: comments are invited on every part of the framework.

The framework was forged in Honduras. Its logic is portable anywhere.

Digital Assets: A Unified Global Framework of Ownership, Regulation, Accounting and Bank Capital (first edition, July 2026, INERTIA Advisory LLC, Roatán) is available now on Amazon:

Available for purchase on Amazon

Jorge Constantino Colindres is an attorney at law, Founding Partner of INERTIA Advisory LLC and Technical Secretary of Próspera ZEDE, where he led the design and deployment of the regulatory framework of the Roatán International Financial Centre. He writes here in his personal and professional capacity; the views expressed are his own and do not state the official position of any institution with which he is affiliated.