All around the world, blockchain projects are being developed and tested, but plenty of work is still pending, mainly on bringing all that technological innovation to the “ground”. Wide adoption and legal recognition, are two of the main not-only-technical challenges we are facing.

About legal recognition, great projects (e.g.: Legal Block) are giving the first steps of something that may benefit this technology more than any code. We need more lawyers involved, understanding, envisioning and helping the world really take advantage of decentralization.

A few months ago, Arizona and Tennessee states in the United States, expressed validity of proofs presented on blockchain and smart contract systems.

“The law also recognizes smart contracts as having legal power, stating that ‘no contract relating to a transaction shall be denied legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because that contract contains a smart contract term.’”

More recently a Chinese court has accepted legal evidence for a dispute, based on a platform that uses bitcoin to hash content.

“The court thinks it should maintain an open and neutral stance on using blockchain to analyze individual cases. We can’t exclude it just because it’s a complex technology. Nor can we lower the standard just because it is tamper-proof and traceable. … In this case, the usage of a third-party blockchain platform that is reliable without conflict of interests provides the legal ground for proving the intellectual infringement.”

This advances are key for the world to better understand the power of data services based on blockchain distributed networks, as they may be setting the first steps to start storing more delicate data on these platforms confident that it will have legal validity.

These kind of news are definitely worth following!