Grounds and Legal Mechanism of Digital Transformation of the Issuance of Official Documents Using NFT in Russia

Abstract

The digital transformation of modern Russian society requires the introduction of new network interaction tools, the predominant among which are blockchain systems. Cryptographic transformation of information allows some blockchain systems to generate non-interchangeable tokens (NFT). Taking into account this possibility, cryptographically protected NFT tokens allows to create unique digital images of various objects that cannot be copied or shared. These technological grounds allow us to put forward the idea of translating the usual documents on physical media (paper passport, certificates) into the NFT form. Taking into account the goals of digital transformation, the principles of building blockchain systems, as well as the essential features of NFT, the authors put forward the idea that NFT can become a reliable way to store and protect official documents. At the same time, Russian law currently does not regulate the implementation of NFT documents. Therefore, the authors propose to consolidate the legal concept of an NFT document in the provisions defining the status of individual official documents and the procedure for their issuance. By an official NFT document certifying legally significant facts, the authors propose to understand such a document, which is created and issued by public authorities or authorized organizations, and represents a unique set of metadata transformed cryptographically. For the effective implementation of the mechanism for issuing NFT documents and its timely improvement, the authors propose to conduct a law-making experiment to introduce into circulation the procedure for issuing individual official documents in the form of NFT, and further scale the results of the experiment taking into account the analysis of its results.