Digital Asset Recovery

Court-ordered asset freezing and recovery

The protocol includes an Alert System: a messaging mechanism by which nodes exchange network-governance messages. Digital Asset Recovery is a use of that system that provides a standardised way for nodes to act on court orders affecting specific outputs.

Each node maintains a blacklist of asset freeze and recovery orders:

• A freeze order names UTXOs that a court has directed be made unspendable.
• A recovery order reassigns funds from a frozen UTXO to a recovery UTXO, for example to return stolen funds to their legal owner.

The consensus handling of frozen outputs — a transaction or block that spends a consensus-frozen output is invalid, and the confiscation-transaction class that implements court-ordered reassignment — is specified under Consensus Rules and the Protocol History page. The specific block heights, message formats, and maturity rules are given there.

The BSV node software ships with digital asset recovery functionality. The legal processes that drive it are administered off-chain and are out of scope for this protocol reference.