CommonAccord startup suggests creating global codes of legal transacting with the help of blockchain. BNP Paribas Bank decided to support the initiative and included it into L’Atelier business accelerator.

According to its press-release, L’Atelier chose eight companies out of 142 to participate in the accelerator. CommonAccord will represent the “legal sphere”. This is a Strasbourg-based blockchain startup focusing on juristic codes and smart contracts. According to the definition of the project,

“CommonAccord is an initiative to create global codes of legal transacting by codifying and automating legal documents, including contracts, permits, organizational documents, and consents. We anticipate that there will be codes for each jurisdiction, in each language. For international dealings and coordination, there will be at least one ‘global’ system.”

Participants of the project are able to synchronise documents and verify operations using any convenient way, including blockchain and even e-mail. For now on, the program is free to use.

“The project is open source. You can contribute: as a lawyer to legal documents, as a coder to our software, as a platform by interfacing with our materials, as a business by using the system, as a benefactor by supporting the effort.”

According to the company's profile on GitHub, currently, some enthusiasts are processing proposals of European Parliament resolutions through the CommonAccord protocol. It is not quite clear, however, how it can be used in the present form.

Apart from CommonAccord, L’Atelier has chosen several other startups that have little or nothing to do with the blockchain technology. One of them, KYC3, provides client companies with Know-Your-Customer documents in the electronic form.

BNP Paribas has previously expressed some reservations about blockchain. Last summer, Johann Palychata, a research analyst at the bank’s Securities Service, designed two different scenarios for the future of the blockchain and bitcoin. According to him, major banks should take blockchain under control.

However, the bank stance towards the technology apparently changed this February, when it organised an IT even on blockchain and opened the position of an IT Assistant for the study of blockchain applications in the financial sector. Now BNP Paribas makes the next step and adds a blockchain-based legal startup among its supported projects.

Roman Korizky