A series of new bills signed by governor John Carney of Delaware established a guiding principle by which the state would view blockchain technology from this point forward. SB182, SB183, and SB194 all give the government the legal framework to treat some types of legally-binding data stored on a blockchain—such as digitally-signed contracts—as any other binding document.
SB182 and SB183 have to do with the way blockchain technology is treated with regards to records created by companies. Until recently, courts of law didn’t have an obligation to take them seriously.
Now that these two have entered the state’s law books, Delaware provides “specific statutory authority for [...] limited partnerships to use networks of electronic databases (examples of which are described currently as ‘distributed ledgers’ or a ‘blockchain’) for the creation and maintenance of limited partnership records and for certain ‘electronic transmissions.”
While it is not absolutely clear what the legal provisions mean by “electronic transmissions,” it is safe to assume that the term refers to any transactional data stored on a blockchain that would otherwise have been stored in a database.
The two bills may involve how government views businesses, but SB194 is the kicker. It amends the state’s Statutory Trust Act, changing the way courts should operate with regards to trusts.
For example, the ownership of a trust can now be proven electronically, allowing trustees’ votes to be recorded in the blockchain through “electronic transmission, including by use of electronic networks or databases, including distributed electronic networks or databases.
The bill’s synopsis emphasizes that these changes have been made “to further the State of Delaware’s initiative to implement policies enhancing the State’s position as a leader in the adoption of distributive electronic network and database technologies.”
Perhaps one of the biggest problems facing this bill is that it does not restrict proof to immutable, zero-trust, and permissionless blockchains, which are indeed a trustworthy form of storing data.
Just because blockchains provide veritable proof of certain things in certain contexts does not mean that all the data coming from every blockchain behaves in the same manner.
Although it is encouraging to see that Delaware is among the few US states making a genuine agenda-driven push to legitimize the status of blockchain technology within their borders, part of the language of the bills that were just signed seems to allow a discomforting amount of ambiguity in the definition of what could be considered “trustworthy” with regards to recordkeeping.
Where there is a potential for abuse, courts will have to step in to fill in the more “interpretable” gaps in these new laws.
This article appeared first on Cryptovest
