A while back I started preparing a proposal for writing 3 articles within the broader topic of privacy preserving legal transformation in Polkadot. You can find the previous proposal here. I had sought feedback via the Kusama Direction channel back then and the topic of Power of Attorney (PoA) was a clear favorite. Therefore, I have now decided to pursue that topic specifically.

To reinforce that, I got feedback from the community members that as a first step to win the community's trust and prove added value, it might be better to focus on a smaller funding amount and as such limit the proposal to just one article. That's exactly my plan now.

Finally, I've been told that by limiting the scope of research to the Swiss law only, the impact for the community might be reduced. As such, I've decided to expand the scope and focus on building a general legal framework to regulate on-chain PoA. The authorities (especially in Europe) will face the same types of challenges when dealing with digitising the legal system and I aim to provide a framework and guidelines for addressing these issues from first principles (both legal and technological). In order to ground my research in a practical environment and not just theoretical constructs, I will use the Swiss juridical system to provide examples where appropriate.

You can find the full proposal on my GitHub. Below is the summary of the topic and as always, feedback is very welcome:

On-chain Power of Attorney: challenges and promises for a legal system.

• How is PoA currently enforced in EU & Switzerland, who benefits from it and who can abuse it?
• Private key ?= full access revisited: a need for additional, trusted verification (or else take all my money).
• A partially government-controlled blockchain - pros and cons. Could a parachain be the solution?
• Encrypted 'allow-revoke' mechanism, revealable only to selected parties, by the means of substrate chain and a user-friendly app.

The resulting research article will be submitted to an open-access journal.