On January 23, 2019, the Italian Senate Committee approved an amendment regarding blockchain technology, which is a first for the country.

To become law, the legislation on Blockchain and smart contracts must now be passed to the Chamber and approved.

The amendment, known as the Decreto Semplificazioni provides basic industry terms including Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), stating that agency for Digital Italy must recognize the technical standards that must be possessed by the technologies based on distributed ledger, and Smart Contracts definitions.

The Italian Government published a list of the country’s top 30 Blockchain experts, in order to provide free advice to authorities concerning ‘national strategy on distributed register and blockchain technologies’.

Now that the amendment has been approved, it still needs a review from the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. Once this approval is given, the amendment will be legally binding and Blockchain can be used for the validation of various documents.