Corporate adoption of distributed-ledger technology received a boost as the State of Delaware announced plans to implement the technology sometime in 2017.
The state government has been working with distributed-ledger vendor Symbiont and legal firm Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman since late last year to overcome the technological and legal issues that have need to be addressed before Delaware can deploy the technology in production.
“The portion of the Delaware Bar Association that has specific purview over corporate law has opined that no new legislation needs to be written in order to embrace distributed ledgers and smart-contract technologies,” said Mark Smith, co-founder and CEO of Symbiont.
Mark Shaw, Symbiont
In the meantime, Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman has been working with the Delaware Bar Association to craft legal clarifications around the current regulation.
Smith declined to go into deep detail about the state’s initial use cases since Delaware Governor Jack Marshall is scheduled to give a keynote address on the same topic at a New York-based blockchain-technology conference in early May.
However, Smith told Markets Media that that the state was pursuing three initial use cases, which involve an internal state process, corporate filings, and something that will deal with the Uniform Commercial Code.
“The state is far beyond a sandbox implementation and is on to real-world applications,” he added.
Delaware has elected to deploy Symbiont’s proprietary technology rather than the open-sourced Hyperledger technology, in which Symbiont is participating in its development.
“This is 100% Symbiont proprietary technology, including Symbiont’s smart security and distributed Ledger,” said Smith.
With more than a million corporations registered in the State of Delaware, Smith is not expecting an across the board adoption of distributed-ledger technology by the Delaware-regulated corporations.
“Every corporation will not be required to utilize this technology, but it certainly open a large audience for us,” he explained. “This will be an option for them but not a requirement.”