California legalized blockchain and smart contracts

Finally, a bill on the introduction of blockchain and smart contracts was approved in California. Together with the new draft law, amendments will be made to the civil, government, insurance and corporate codes.

PlasmaPay
PlasmaPay
Sep 4, 2018 · 2 min read

It is interesting that before the bill was approved, the authorities had presented a document giving clear legal definitions of “blockchain technology” and “smart contract”. Its authors are pretty certain that this will help to legalize operations related to DLT (distributed registry technology).

Here are these definitions:

“Blockchain technology is a distributed registry technology that uses a distributed, decentralized and shared registry; public or private; with access rights management or open; with tokenized cryptoeconomics or without tokens. The data in the registry is protected by cryptography, unchangeable, amenable to audit and provides uncensored veracity, “the bill says.

A smart contract is an “event-driven program that operates in a distributed, decentralized and common registry that can take control and entrust the transfer of assets in this registry.” In addition, in accordance with the amendments, smart contracts will be included in the general legal definition of “contracts”.

There had already been a good legal basis for the new bill in California. Let’s have a closer look at the Law on Electronic Transactions. It says that the record, contract or signature can not be stripped of legal force just due to the fact that they are presented in digital form. In turn, Bill №2658 expands these concepts and allows the inclusion of the smart contracts and data stored in the blockchain in the definitions of “electronic record” and “electronic signature”.

In addition, the document notes that “a person using the blockchain technology to store data related to internal or external commerce retains the same ownership and usage rights as before entering data into the distributed registry.”

Bill №2658 will come into force right after the approval of Jerry Brown, the Mayor of California.

PlasmaPay

Payment platform on blockchain. Plasmapay.com

PlasmaPay

Written by

PlasmaPay

First crypto/fiat payment platform. Made by @ilyamk

PlasmaPay

PlasmaPay

Payment platform on blockchain. Plasmapay.com

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