Delaware is Allowing Companies to Use Blockchain in Maintaining Transaction Records

On July 21, Delaware Governor John Carney officially signed a bill that legalized companies to utilize blockchain technology or distributed ledger technology in creating and maintaining transactions, stocks and corporate records.

According to the Delaware Economic Development Office, the state of Delaware houses nearly 1 million businesses entities and a staggering 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Analysts expect the government of Delaware’s decision to legalize blockchain records keeping to drastically increase development activity around blockchain technology within the state, especially amongst large-scale conglomerates and Fortune 500 companies.

Already, some of the largest companies in the US including JPMorgan Chase and Microsoft are building blockchain-based applications with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin previously revealed that most of the multi-billion dollar companies within the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance are seriously considering automating certain operations of the company with the Ethereum blockchain and smart contract technology.

More to that, Buterin explained that the Ethereum Foundation and its development team are working toward migrating the Ethereum network to a proof of stake consensus protocol to prioritize flexibility and to ensure scalability for decentralized applications.

“There are a few perspectives. First of all, we will keep developing the technology and solving pressing challenges, some of them we already started working on, but there is still a lot to be done, including scaling, confidentiality, security issues. These issues need to be solved to ensure further development of the protocol and the whole ecosystem. Besides, we are focusing on the expansion of the system – to make sure that more projects are building on top of Ethereum, more companies and users working with the platform, exploring new use cases,” said Buterin.

Legally, under Delaware regulations, starting August 1, companies can freely utilize blockchain technology including the Ethereum and bitcoin blockchain networks to maintain and create corporate records. Hence, development activity around Ethereum, bitcoin and other blockchain networks will likely increase significantly in the upcoming months.

Although the Ethereum network was designed to operate as an ecosystem for decentralized application and thus is far more flexible than bitcoin, there exists some platforms and technologies such as Bitcoin Core developer Peter Todd-led OpenTimestamps that enable organizations, companies and applications to utilize the bitcoin blockchain to stamp and verify data.

At the moment, some blockchain identity startups including Veris art, Stampery and Signature are utilizing OpenTimestamps to cryptographically secure transaction and other records and in the future, Delaware-based companies could opt for bitcoin-based blockchain platforms such as OpenTimestamps to improve their existing infrastructures.