Taxonomy and characterisation
The same word means different things in different regimes
A curated, jurisdiction-aware taxonomy sits underneath the platform. It is what lets DALI apply the right test in the right regime instead of guessing from the language of the question.
The problem
Terminology in this field is contested, not just technical
The words are frequently advocacy positions rather than neutral descriptors, and they do not travel between jurisdictions intact.
Token, stablecoin, staking, custody, decentralised, DAO, airdrop, utility: each is used inconsistently across markets, regulators, litigants and technical communities. A characterisation that is correct under one jurisdiction’s test is wrong under another’s even when the surface language is identical.
This is the failure that a retrieval-based tool does not fix. It can find you a real document and quote it accurately, and still apply the wrong regime’s meaning, because nothing in retrieval resolves what a word denotes here. The statistically dominant sense of a term in this field is usually the US one, which is how a UK fact pattern quietly acquires an American answer.
How it is modelled
One concept, many local realisations
A concept is held once. How each jurisdiction expresses it is held separately, and explicitly.
For a given jurisdiction, a concept carries its local term and the aliases actually used for it, the local regulatory category it falls into, the governing instrument, the defining test that decides whether something is in scope, and the regulator responsible.
So a characterisation resolves to a named regulatory category under a named instrument, with the test behind it on the record. It is traceable rather than asserted, and because the mapping is explicit per jurisdiction, the same instrument can be shown under several regimes at once with the divergences side by side instead of flattened into one answer.
A surface, not just a layer
The map is something you can open
It underpins the rest of the platform, and it is also a view in its own right.
The map is laid out as a grid. Each row is a coordinate in substance, meaning what a thing actually is, and each cell is that jurisdiction’s own regulated category for it, cited to the instrument that controls it. Nothing is translated into a house vocabulary: you read each regime in its own terms, side by side.
Families currently mapped include stablecoins, security tokens, utility and exchange tokens, NFTs, and tokenised deposits and e-money, across the UK, EU, US, Singapore, Hong Kong, the DIFC and ADGM. You can pick a base jurisdiction and compare it against another, narrow to the coordinates where the base has a genuine equivalent, or search for a term and see where it lands in each regime.
It is the fastest way to answer a question lawyers ask constantly and tools rarely support directly: what would this be called, and what would govern it, over there?
Mapping between regimes
Four strengths, and the fourth matters most
Equivalence is recorded directionally: that one regime's category subsumes another's is not the same as the reverse, and the model does not assume symmetry.
Exact
The two regimes recognise the same thing under the same test. The mapping carries across without qualification.
Partial
The concepts overlap but do not coincide. The record carries a note saying precisely where the mapping breaks.
Analogous
No formal counterpart, but a recognised concept behaves similarly enough to reason from, with the disanalogy stated rather than buried.
No equivalent
The other regime has nothing corresponding. This is recorded as a finding in its own right, with its own citation, not left as a silence for the reader to misread as sameness.
“No equivalent” is the highest-value thing this map records. It is the finding a cross-border question most often turns on, and it is exactly what a tool without a taxonomy cannot tell you, because an absence looks identical to a gap in its retrieval.
Discipline
Nothing enters the map uncited
The taxonomy is an editorial asset with a publication gate, not a model output.
A jurisdiction’s realisation of a concept cannot be published without at least one citation, and neither can an equivalence between two of them. Entries move through draft, published and retired states rather than being edited silently in place.
This is the difference between a curated map and a model’s impression of one. It is slower to build, and it is the reason the characterisation can be defended when a counterparty disagrees with it.
Beyond one field
Anchored to traditional finance as well as to other jurisdictions
Much of the argument in this area is about what a novel instrument most resembles in settled law.
The map also holds anchors in settled areas: securities and payments regulation, partnership law, trust law, so a digital asset concept can be mapped against the traditional-finance concept it derives from or resembles, not only against its counterpart in another country.
That axis is what supports reasoning by analogy where a regime has not yet spoken: the comparison is to a recorded, cited anchor with the disanalogy stated, rather than to whatever the model happens to associate.
Bring a characterisation that is being argued about
The taxonomy is easiest to judge on a term where two regimes genuinely diverge. Tell us which one and we will show you what the map holds.