According to the Italian newspaper Sole 24 Ore, the regulation that would have given legal value to timestamping on the blockchain in Italy was removed from the Simplification Decree 2019.
This should not be surprising for two reasons.
The first is that the Simplification Decree is a decree law and as such, it should be treated with urgency, while the regulation related to the blockchain has no need in this regard.
Therefore, the fact that it has been removed from the government decree does not mean that it has been abandoned: it is possible that, given the lack of urgency, it will be instead recovered in Parliament when the decree is converted into law.
This will take place at a later date, and will allow the Parliament itself to create a broader regulatory framework.
In fact, the second reason why the text concerning the blockchain could have been removed is linked to the perplexities highlighted in recent days, precisely with regard to the overall Italian regulatory framework in which this rule would be inserted.
This framework seems to be in contrast with one of the founding pillars of the legislation that would have given legal value to timestamping on the blockchain, namely the lack of the so-called “trust service providers” for decentralized blockchains.
In fact, according to the general Italian regulatory framework, these would be necessary to consider the electronic time stamping as qualified, to the extent that the decree would then leave the Digital Italy Agency (AGID) the burden of clarifying the technical specifications of the distributed ledgers in order to recognize the effective legal validity.
Now there are two hypotheses: either the regulation will be recovered in the future and perhaps expanded or modified to better match the current regulatory framework, or it will be necessary to create a new regulatory framework in which it can be inserted.
