In Britain, you can now use the blockchain to sue someone.
A UK judge gave the go-ahead to serve legal documents -- the process of bringing a lawsuit to a person’s attention -- over the blockchain ledger by a nonfungible token for the first time, according to court documents made public this week.
An NFT is a line of code on the blockchain that confirmsunique certificatesof authenticity. They’re typically used to prove ownership of a piece of digital art.
The ruling comes from a case brought by Fabrizio D’Aloia, founder of an online gambling company, who’s suing cryptocurrency exchangeBinance Holdingsand other platforms. D’Aloia filed the claim after his crypto assets were fraudulently cloned on the brokerages.
The court also ruled that the exchanges were responsible for ensuring stolen crypto is not moved or taken out of their systems.
The service will now take place by airdropping the lawsuit documents via NFT into two wallets that were originally used by D’Aloia and stolen by the fraudsters. This paves the way for victims of crypto fraud to sue unknown crooks in the UK, law firm Giambrone & Partners LLP said.
A US court made a similar move to authorize service via an NFT in June.
(Updates with an explanation of a nonfungible token in the third paragraph)