Recently, a government official of the Washington State, US has reportedly enacted a new bill regarding the legal stand and validity of electronic records in State Laws.

Specifically, the new bill – dubbed Substituted Senate Bill 5638 –  has recently been granted approval to become law by the Governor of Washington State Jay Inslee. The bill aimed to clarify the legal stand, as well as the validity of digital records and distributed ledger such as blockchain.

The former version of the bill was proposed by four Republican Senators on January 25, which aims to amend and add an act to the current “Washington Electronic Authentication Act”. The bill has officially received its passage after undergoing a 96–1 voting result in its favor, and will be widely applied sometime around the end of July 2019.

A clause in the bill was exclusively devoted to provide support and protect the growth of electronic records and distributing technologies.

“An electronic record may not be denied legal effect, validity, or enforceability solely because it is generated, communicated, received, or stored using distributed ledger technology.”

The newly passed bill also provided clarity to the legal definition of a few terms such as “Blockchain” or “distributed ledger” – a technology that is being increasingly utilized across various fields such as product supply chain management and real estate transactions.

Earlier, five Democratic and Republican senators have reportedly put forwards house bill 5595 with aims to relieve “open blockchain tokens” developers or vendors of the provisions of Rhode Island Uniform Securities Act.