Regulating Distributed Ledgers as Legal Institutions Based in Trust Services

On 3 June 2013, Margrethe Vestager, Executive Vice-President of the European Commission for a Europe fit for the Digital Age, and Thierry Breton, Commissioner for the Internal Market, presented in Brussels the expected text of the proposal to amend Regulation (EU) No 910/2014 of 23 July 2013 (‘eIDAS Regulation’) to establish a framework for the European Digital Identity (COM (2021) 281 final, or “eIDAS 2 Proposal”), which fosters and gives full legal validity to the electronic ledgers. Distributed ledger technologies such as blockchains offer highly relevant opportunities for the transformation of digital processes by sustaining data and document processing that until the emergence of these technologies required third-party databases. In this article we present the fundamental features of these technologies, and we introduce the new regulation proposed in relation to them into European Union law.