UK Judge Greenlights Blockchain Process Serving via NFT

A judge in the Unit­ed King­dom has giv­en the approval for legal doc­u­ments to be served over a blockchain via a non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT).

Ser­vice of process, the pro­ce­dure by which a par­ty to a law­suit gives an appro­pri­ate notice of ini­tial legal action to anoth­er par­ty, can now occur over a blockchain in Britain, accord­ing to court doc­u­ments. The notice of ser­vice itself would take the form of an NFT. Although these usu­al­ly take the form of art­work, NFTs can also be thought of as dig­i­tal cer­tifi­cates of authenticity.

You’ve been served—NFT style

The rul­ing comes from a case brought by the founder of an online gam­bling com­pa­ny against cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges and oth­er plat­forms includ­ing Binance. Accord­ing to the claim filed by Fab­rizio D’Aloia, his cryp­to assets were fraud­u­lent­ly cloned while in the cus­tody of the bro­ker­ages. The court ruled that the exchanges were thus respon­si­ble for ensur­ing that stolen cryp­to was not moved or tak­en out of their systems. 

The ser­vice will take place via the air­drop­ping of the law­suit doc­u­ments in the form of an NFT into a pair of wal­lets orig­i­nal­ly used by D’Aloia, which had been pil­fered by the fraudsters. 

This action sets a prece­dent for vic­tims of cryp­to fraud to sue unknown crooks in the UK, accord­ing to law firm Giambrone & Part­ners LLP. Last month, a court in the Unit­ed States made a sim­i­lar move to autho­rize ser­vice via NFT. 

Blockchain reporting

This wouldn’t be the first time that U.K. author­i­ties per­form their duties over a blockchain. Last year, the U.K.’s Finan­cial Con­duct Author­i­ty and the Bank of Eng­land deployed a blockchain net­work to han­dle reg­u­la­to­ry reporting. 

“By con­nect­ing to firms through blockchain and API tech­nol­o­gy and imple­ment­ing machine-read­able and exe­cutable reg­u­la­tion, com­pli­ance checks can be com­plet­ed in near real-time,” said FCA Chief Exec­u­tive Nikhil Rathi of the initiative.

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