
Integra Ledger, the legal blockchain pioneer, has launched ‘Integra Ledger Connect’ to help lawyers authenticate and automate contracts, which the company sees as very timely in a new era where genAI can be used for deepfakes and other forms of data manipulation, as well as creating unintentional errors and hallucinations as key documents are reviewed and edited.
Key features include:
- ‘Guards Against AI Manipulation: Provides a robust shield for critical documents against emerging AI-driven risks, ensuring the authenticity of contracts, invoices, payments, and financial records in an increasingly complex digital landscape.
- Eliminate Document Fraud and Uncertainty: Registers and timestamps a permanent blockchain identifier and hash (‘digital fingerprint’) for every document, guaranteeing absolute time- and date-stamped document identity and integrity while reducing administrative costs and errors.
- Streamline Cross-Organizational Workflows: Enables peer-to-peer contract automation between organizations even when they are using different software, unlocking efficiencies previously considered unattainable throughout entire ecosystems of clients and suppliers.
- Enhance Transaction Trust with Contract Tokenization: Digitally binds ownership information to contract identity, providing public proof of transactions on the Integra Ledger blockchain and increasing transaction integrity, trust, and efficiency
- Integrated Financial Solutions: Optionally encodes payment instructions directly into contracts, supporting ACH, credit card, and cryptocurrency transactions while integrating smoothly with existing payment software.
- Comprehensive Compliance Protection: Registers digital proof of all contract-related events with an immutable blockchain- registered audit trail, streamlining due diligence and safeguarding against mistakes and disputes.’
The company added that the ‘cloud-based version allows individual users and small organizations to tokenize their first contracts in minutes. For enterprises requiring advanced security and privacy, the software can be deployed on private servers or cloud infrastructure’. Integra Ledger Connect also integrates with leading e-signature applications like DocuSign, Adobe Sign, and Dropbox Sign.
Now, you could say that this is to some extent simply repackaging what was already possible with blockchain tech, i.e. taking the immutable truth approach and applying it to documents to have greater certainty.
But, even so, the argument that genAI opens up new risks around document authenticity does ring true.
This site asked Integra CEO, David Fisher, if there has been an uptick in interest in legal blockchain solutions after something of a cooling off for such projects in recent years?
Fisher replied: ‘Blockchain has followed the Gartner hype cycle. We’re past the ‘trough of disillusionment’ and now ascending the ‘slope of enlightenment’ towards the ‘plateau of productivity’.
Data trust has always been valuable, but with the emergence of GenAI there has been an enormous spike in awareness of the topic, brought on by questions about how to trust ‘answers’ delivered by AI.
Interest seems to be coalescing around three big issues:
- If AI is something of a black box, how much trust is there in the provenance of the source data, in the first place?
- GenAI has a worrying ability to spoof almost anything, especially as it improves. To that end, what will the impact be on 1? Furthermore, once there is some probability of data corruption, how can you even identify it?
- A super-sensitive issue is information governance – something currently governed by general agreements between organizations. The practical reality is that there is almost no way to enforce that, because a document detached from the originating organization’s database cannot be easily traced back to governance agreements and rules. Blockchain identity for contracts solves that in a way that is almost impossible for legacy systems.
Circling back on your question – there is rapidly growing interest in these new types of blockchain applications, where blockchain is arguably the only answer.’
So, there you go. Just when you thought legal blockchain was in the past, it’s rising up again – and the trigger is genAI. Will it embed this time? We shall see…