The Supreme Court of China establishes admissible blockchain evidence in legal disputes

The Supreme People's Court of China, the highest court level in mainland China, today announced that the evidence obtained from the blockchain technology of the general ledger can be used in court.

The announcement (in Chinese, readable in English through Google Translate) outlines a long list of clarifications on the law regarding electronic evidence and how the courts should behave towards the law. The rules come into effect immediately.

Among these additional rules and guidelines, the ad includes a section that mentions blockchains as a legitimate source as a method for authenticating digital evidence.

"Electronic data submitted by the parties can prove their authenticity by electronic signature, trust timestamp, hash value control, blockchain and other evidence collection, fixed and tamper-proof technical means or through certification of the electronic forensic evidence platform The Internet court should confirm, "the Supreme Court has published in its announcement.

Blockchain technology provides a tamper-proof, blended mixed-media platform to ensure privacy for participants and provide a genuinely authentic audit trail. In some sectors, blockchains were explored to facilitate companies' adherence to regulatory requirements, including high security sectors such as banking and finance.

According to the court document, the parties involved in presenting such evidence may present an expert to speak to the standard of reliability and verification of the blockchain in question.

This announcement follows the formation of what is considered to be the first "internet court" during August 2017 in the city of Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province – an already well-established center of the Chinese industry of & # 39; e-commerce. China plans to open two more courts on the Internet, one in the capital of the country, Beijing and the other in the southern city of Guangzhou.

Court records are conducted entirely online and the court follows the same rules of procedure and tests for normal tests.

CoinDesk reported in June that a court in the Hangzhou Internet court decided that evidence authenticated with blockchain technology could be legally admitted to court during a copyright infringement case.

Plaintiff's evidence was provided by bitcoin and Factom blockchain, including cryptographic hashes to prove the origin of the data, through a third-party site called baoquan.com, a blockchain-based testing placement platform.

"The court thinks it should maintain an open and neutral position on the use of the blockchain to analyze individual cases," the judge said at the time. "We can not exclude it just because it is a complex technology, nor can we lower the standard just because it is tamper-proof and traceable, in which case the use of a reliable third-party blockchain platform without conflict of interest provides the legal ground to prove the intellectual infraction. "

After examining the evidence, including those provided by blockchain sources, the judge favored the plaintiff.

Although many industries have explored distributed blockchain platforms to provide regulatory compliance and reliable audit trails for regulators, the legal status of blockchain testing has so far been extensively tested worldwide.

Firms have already started emerging designed to exploit the tamper-proof nature of blockchains to act as legal evidence with outfits such as Cygnetise Ltd., based in the UK, which has built a blockchain for authorized signatures for legal documents.

Another excellent example is a partnership between Onchain, a universal open source blockchain service and the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. which started development on a platform called "Law Chain" for the specific purpose of storing the stored e-mails as a verifiable test file.

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