Florida May Legally Recognize Blockchain Data and Smart Contracts

During the last couple of months, the popularity of smart contracts has increased considerably, given the wide variety of potential use cases that the technology has. However, one of the biggest impediments standing before its evolution and mass-adoption is legislative. Unregulated smart contracts have no legal value, therefore making them obsolete in many cases.

Luckily, it seems like legislative efforts are being made towards achieving a regulation of digital signatures, blockchain data and smart contracts, in the United States. According to recent reports, a lawmaker in Florida, just introduced a bill meant to regulate the three technology pillars, which, if approved, could open up doors to many potential use cases.

The House Bill no. 1357 is meant to introduce several amendments, which would help various use cases of blockchain technology and smart contracts, to become legally-binding methods for data storage purposes, as long as the measures do not break any of the existing regulations.

It is important to point out the fact that the bill mentions: "record or contract that is secured through blockchain technology is in an electronic form and is an electronic record." Additionally, the bill also clarifies that a signature recorded through the blockchain network can quality as valid, from a legal standpoint.

With this in mind, judging by the three qualifications mentioned in the bill, if a person uses the blockchain data ledger to store information, it would be legally recognized that the person in question has all rights to it.

The bill also refers to smart contracts, and therefore states that contracts signed electronically, and containing a smart contract term, would be applicable as well.

If the bill passes, Florida will become yet another state to fully recognize smart contracts and blockchain-stored records. Similar bills have been passed in other states as well, yet no federal bill was issued yet.

It is expected that in the future, more and more country government will adopt similar measures, to establish the legality and integrity of smart contracts and blockchain-based records.

Based on everything that has been outlined so far, full legal acceptance of the technology could allow it to evolve, and provide people throughout the world with many more online solutions, thus reducing bureaucracy at state-level, and increasing both speed and security of such processes.