Jurisdiction, Recognition and Enforcement of Judgments in Claims Arising out of Smart Contracts under the Brussels I Regulation (recast) and on the Blockchain

Abstract

Blockchain or Distributed Ledger Technology is a transformational computing innovation.1 It was created under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009 as a protocol to the Bitcoin cryptocurrency.2 Blockchain is a decentralized database, which is stored and updated simultaneously in a network of computers called nodes.3 Transactions are carried out peer-to-peer or user-to-user, chained together and cannot be separated. Each operation is irreversibly registered in a block of data which stores several operations and encrypts the block’s content through an algorithm called “hash”. The encryption key of a blockchain transaction is based on the previous transaction. In this way, access to a particular transaction allows to know all its previous history. Indeed, when a transaction is decrypted to be read, if the previous transaction has been manipulated, the current transaction will not be readable.4 The blocks of transactions are distributed among the different nodes.5 T