DocuSign Ethereum Blockchain Integration Will Give An Alternative For Signature Verification

By
Aamir Kapoor
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DocuSign Will Add Ethereum Blockchain Integration to Verify Signatures. San Francisco based DocuSign has announced the integration of the Ethereum blockchain into its electronic signature and transaction management service.

The company, which currently has over 400,000 paying customers, will now have an option for customers to have evidence of a DocuSigned agreement automatically recorded on the Ethereum blockchain. This option will be an alternative to the company’s native system for verifying signatures and is poised to be a natural fit for customers who want to have evidence of their agreements in a neutral environment.

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

Ron Hirson, chief product officer at DocuSign, stated in the release:

“For customers that opt-in, DocuSign will compute a one-way cryptographic hash fingerprint for every completed transaction, and write the value to the Ethereum blockchain — the most popular blockchain for smart contracts in our view.”

He went further to explain the hash will act as “tamper-proof evidence for the transaction” that “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 company has been researching on smart contract since it first collaborated with Visa, creating one of the first public prototypes. The prototype, which was developed in 2015, was a proof-of-concept that brought together secure contracts and payments made online via a connected car prototype developed by Visa for car-based commerce.

At the time, Hirson said:

“This proof-of-concept makes it easier and faster for customers to get out the door in their new car by bringing together smart contracts and payments so that customers can electronically sign all pertinent documents and seamlessly pay in one fully digital experience.”

The company has also joined the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance, as it hopes to continue innovating in the space. DocuSign recently relaunched a new developer center.

In a tweet shared on Oct. 13, the company also unveiled other new product features including Intelligent Insights and mobile document scanning into its operations. According to the report, mobile document scanning, which was released to iOS devices last year, is now compatible with Android devices.

This allows you to scan any document and then edit, crop, and resize them before importing them into DocuSign for your signature. Intelligent Insights is another feature that uses AI-based search and agreement analytics to go beyond keywords in understanding agreement clauses in the way a human would, e.g., knowing that a clause about Internet cookies is a document centered on privacy, even when the keyword “privacy” is absent.

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.

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.

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