(Yicai Global) Aug. 14 -- China's Supreme People's Court is stepping up its efforts to build a judicial blockchain platform to better preserve evidence, and courts, judicial forensic centers and notary offices in many provinces and cities have joined the platform, local media Beijing Youth Daily reported today.

Some 180 million items of data have been preserved on blockchains and forensic verification can be conducted via the technology, the high court revealed at a recent meeting, per the report.

The court has devised a set of technical requirements to guide and regulate lower Chinese tribunals' data management on evidentiary blockchains, the report said, citing Chen Baogui, director of the data management division of the supreme court information center.

Digital evidence is defined as information and data of value to an investigation or judicial proceeding that is stored on, received or transmitted by an electronic device. It may consist of, e.g. fingerprint scans or other images, DNA records, soft copies of legal, corporate, scientific or personal documents, computer codes but can take a host of other forms. The importance of blockchain  -- which is also the matrix supporting Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies -- is in guaranteeing the integrity and genuineness of digital evidence and that it has not been tampered with.

Judicial blockchains solve the credibility issue in the generation, storage, transmission, extraction and validation of e-evidence based on the technology's inherent safeguards against falsification of information.

The Internet Court in eastern China's tech city of Hangzhou completed the country's first judicial blockchain platform in September. Other courts in Shanghai and in Zhejiang, Jiangsu and Anhui provinces built a judicial blockchain platform spanning the Yangtze River Delta region in May in China's first cross-regional judicial blockchain.

Editor: Ben Armour