The BitFury Group, a world leading blockchain service provider, has announced a partnership with Chinese electronic document company BestSign.

With this agreement, BitFury plans to bring its expertise in distributed cryptographic ledger technology, also called blockchain technology, to power BestSign’s electronic document signing platform.

A blockchain can be used to provide auditable, time-stamped verification that a particular transaction occurred — in this case, that a person signed a specific document at a particular time.

This is done by producing a cryptographic hash of the document as it is currently, so that any change to the document can be detected. The identity of the signer is then processed as a transaction on a blockchain. That transaction is secured in a blockchain block, which provides an auditable event that can be used to show that a specific document was signed by a particular person at a definite time.

Miss Joy Wan, chief executive of BestSign said that the intent of the partnership is “to jointly develop electronic contract products based on the underlying technology for blockchain.”

BestSign intends to not just use BitFury’s blockchain technology for the purpose of verifying documents, but also “facilitate the real use of blockchain technology in the electronic contract sector [and] advance the application of blockchain technologies such as distributed ledgers and smart contracts.”

Smart contracts allow for an entirely new level of contract verification and enforcement by placing the terms of a contract directly into a blockchain transaction that only completes once the contract terms can be verified. With a smart contract, the rules and penalties surrounding an agreement are encoded and therefore automatically enforced by code for the participants. Furthermore, because the smart contract exists on a blockchain, its formation, execution and even mediation can be audited and authenticated by a third party.

As one of China’s largest electronic document signing platforms, BestSign provides clients with a full suite of solutions, from electronic signatures to dispute resolution. Its customer base includes companies such as China UnionPay, Sina, Lenovo, TCL, Midea, NOAH, Mobp2p, Quant Group, Fengqile.com and Zhaogang.com. The company also has partnerships with major technology firms in China including Apple, Intel, Microsoft and WPS.

BitFury acts as an infrastructure and service provider for platforms seeking to use blockchain technology and has been seeking to expand further into China. In January, BitFury received $30 million in investment from Credit China Fintech Holdings Limited to facilitate this.

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