Shaoxing Court Gives the First-Ever Criminal Sentence Verdict Based on Blockchain Evidences

As per recent reports, a court in the Chinese city of Shaoxing has announced its verdict of the criminal sentence in a case associated with blockchain deposits. As such, it is the first-ever criminal sentence verdict given in China. In a consultation revealed on Wednesday, the People’s Court of Shangyu District successfully used DLT (Distributed Ledger Technology) to ensure that the evidence brought in by blockchain was authentic and efficient to settle the given case.

The defendant was accused of committing fraud at various provinces of the nation and tricking people to nearly about 10,000 Yuan. The immutability feature of the blockchain technology brought this offense into the light, based on which the defendant was given a verdict for imprisonment for 14 months.

To bring in this robust evidence against the case, the judicial department of the district joined hands with the Ant Financial (a division of Alibaba) for developing a blockchain system, for storing evidence against the defendant. Unlike other storage systems like CD or any other centralized system, blockchain systems cannot be tampered and so provides the strongest and unbiased evidence.

In support of this, the head of Shangyu’s Court of Appeal said,

The blockchain is a [DLT] that is tamper-proof, traceable and shared. The use of the blockchain for encryption and storage has been confirmed by the Supreme People’s Court as early as 2018, and there have been judgments in civil and commercial cases, but the application in criminal cases is still the first in the country.