U.S. Digital Signing Giant DocuSign Integrates Ethereum For Smart Contract Signature Verification

U.S.-based DocuSign announced it will integrate the Ethereum blockchain and legal AI company Seal Software in its electronic signing business, starting immediately.

AI and Blockchain

The announcements are part of DocuSign’s Fall ‘18 Release, which sees the company offering clients an “Intelligent Insights” solution to help clients in understanding legal clauses of important agreements. The update is powered by Seal Software’s contract extraction and discovery platform which helps companies reduce expenses related to contractual documents.

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💡 Intelligent Insights
📲 Mobile Document Scanning

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— DocuSign (@DocuSign) October 13, 2018

As an example, Seal can scan a document about internet cookies, recognize it pertains to privacy laws, and extract all instances of the word “privacy;” which if absent, notifies owners about a potential breach of contract.

The technology also classifies and compares how different companies handle documents and topics and provide analytics to consumers to spot risks, opportunities, and anomalies swiftly. Seal will also add its updated GDPR Compliance Pack to DocuSign clients – a protocol designed specifically to help companies comply with the European Union’s GDPR regulations by analyzing all legal agreements for risks involved.

DocuSign has over 400,000 clients – and “millions of individual users” –  using its services and is a massively popular platform amongst legal, technological, and financial companies. With the new development, clients will be introduced to two distributions touted to lead the so-called “Fourth Industrial Revolution;” blockchain technology and AI.

Ethereum Protocol to Add Security

With the integration of Ethereum, enterprises can remotely verify signatures and the “integrity” of any DocuSign but matching it against similar records on the Ethereum blockchain.

Ron Hirson, chief product officer at DocuSign, stated customers opting for the blockchain-based feature will receive a computed, “one-way” cryptographic hash fingerprint that records every completed transaction and uploads the data to the Ethereum blockchain. He called the world’s second largest network (by market cap) the “most popular blockchain” for creating smart contracts.

Hirson added:

“This hash acts as tamper-proof evidence for the transaction and enables any completed document to be validated independently. And by using the Ethereum blockchain, that third party evidence for a transaction is accessible to anyone.”

The development can provide evidence of integrating blockchain-based mechanisms in currently-used software infrastructures without disrupting workflow. In a short span, the broader blockchain community has seen naysayers proclaiming “no use” for the technology to a plethora of companies and governments adopting and supplementing their system with the innovation.

Smart contracts, in particular, have caught the attention of authorities worldwide as they look towards eliminating fraud and increase transparency. Recently, the World Bank used Ethereum to issue a $73 million bond in Australia for experimenting with and testing the economic aspects of deploying the technology on a large scale.