China decides 3M court cases on blockchain-powered platform

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China has now settled over 3 million court cases on the blockchain in just nine months. The country’s Supreme Court ruled that blockchain could authenticate evidence in September 2018. Since then, smart courts have become quite popular, taking advantage of AI and blockchain technology to ease the judicial process.

Registered users have settled over 3.14 million litigation activities using the smart courts between March and October, a report by Xinhua revealed. The state-run news agency, which is the largest in the world, reports that the smart courts are taking hold in the country’s judicial system.

The smart courts now boast of having 1.16 million registered users, the report stated, citing a white paper by the Supreme People’s Court titled “Chinese Courts and Internet Judiciary.” Over 73,000 lawyers have also registered with the smart courts.

The paper notes China’s commitment to building online judiciary systems that utilize cloud computing, big data, blockchain technology and artificial intelligence. By combining these technologies, the judiciary has a more convenient, faster and cheaper to conduct its procedures.

As CoinGeek reported, China’s top court ruled that evidence authenticated using blockchain technology was legally binding in September last year. The ruling allowed blockchain to be applied in internet courts, which were already applying AI, big data and cloud computing. Part of the ruling stated:

“Internet courts shall recognize digital data that are submitted as evidence if relevant parties collected and stored these data via blockchain with digital signatures, reliable timestamps and hash value verification or via a digital deposition platform, and can prove the authenticity of such technology used.”

Blockchain use in official government processes has been on the rise in the past few years, in China and beyond. One sector where blockchain has taken off is in voting. South Korea experimented with blockchain voting a year ago, while in Russia, the ruling party conducted its e-voting exercise on the blockchain in March. In the U.S., a number of states are working on the same. West Virginia and Denver were the first states to enable blockchain-powered voting, with Utah joining them a few months ago.