Arizona passes another blockchain law as states vie for business attention

Newswire: April 5, 2018.

Dateline: Phoenix.

Arizona has passed another law recognizing blockchain technology, this one allowing Arizona corporations to hold and share data on a blockchain.

The bill, which passed quickly, addresses mainly a technical question, but it again signals a friendliness in the state government to blockchain entrepreneurship. Numerous states have passed blockchain or smart contract laws over the past year, mainly as a show that companies exploring that technology can do so fully under their laws.

About a year ago, Arizona passed a bill recognizing smart contracts and electronic signatures as valid as paper signatures and contracts under state law. The new law was cited as a reason Arizona later saw significant market growth in cryptocurrency ATMs.

Last week, the Electronic Signature & Records Association issued a joint statement with the Chamber of Digital Commerce regarding the multiple blockchain laws passed at the state level in the United States recently. The two said that laws seeking to define blockchain or smart contract technology, or to ensure the enforceability of smart contracts, breed inconsistency and redundancy despite the good intentions behind their proposal.

“Because existing laws – notably the Uniform Electronic Transactions Act (UETA) and the Federal Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce (ESIGN) – already provide a sufficient legal foundation for the enforcement of these types of agreements,” ESRA and the Digital Chamber said, “we believe additional state legislation will only serve to create inconsistent and redundant state laws, hindering innovation, and are opposed to such efforts.”

Read the full story here.