Has a European court accepted a blockchain timestamp?

Yes. On 20 March 2025 the Tribunal Judiciaire de Marseille accepted blockchain-anchored SHA-256 hashes of design sketches as proof of anteriority in a counterfeiting dispute brought by AZ Factory, in what commentators described as the first clear French judgment of its kind. The sketches had been anchored in May and September 2021, well before the dispute.

Does eIDAS recognise blockchain timestamps?

It does not treat them as qualified, but Article 41(1) provides that an electronic timestamp cannot be denied legal effect or admissibility merely because it is electronic or unqualified. So a blockchain record is admissible across the EU while carrying none of the presumption that Article 41(2) gives a qualified timestamp.

Is Italy's blockchain timestamp law in force?

Article 8-ter of Law 12/2019 is on the books but is generally treated as unimplemented, because it delegates the necessary technical standards to AgID and those standards were never issued. It is worth citing as evidence of legislative direction rather than as an operative rule.

Blockchain Evidence in European Courts

European courts have moved from treating blockchain records as a curiosity to treating them as evidence. That change is recent, uneven, and considerably more limited than the marketing in this industry suggests.

Here is what has actually happened.

France: the Marseille judgment

On 20 March 2025, the Tribunal Judiciaire de Marseille decided a counterfeiting dispute between AZ Factory and a Chinese company concerning pyjamas derived from sketches by the designer Alber Elbaz.

AZ Factory produced a blockchain anchoring certificate containing the SHA-256 hash of its creation files, anchored on a public blockchain in May and September 2021 — well before the disputed collection appeared. The court accepted the timestamp as establishing anteriority and treated it as contributing to establishing ownership of the copyright.

Commentators described it as the first clear French recognition of blockchain timestamping in a civil counterfeiting action.

Two details are worth extracting, because they are the transferable part:

The timestamps predated the dispute by years. Records created after a conflict starts prove far less, and may invite the inference that they were made for the litigation.
The record was reproducible. A hash anchored in a public chain can be checked by anyone. That is what let the court treat it as documentary evidence rather than as an assertion.

The EU baseline: eIDAS Article 41

Underneath any national decision sits the eIDAS Regulation, and it draws one line that matters.

A qualified electronic timestamp comes from an audited qualified trust service provider. Article 41(2) gives it a legal presumption as to the accuracy of its date and the integrity of the data. That presumption is what makes it valuable — it shifts who has to prove what.

A blockchain timestamp is not qualified. But Article 41(1) is equally operative: an electronic timestamp shall not be denied legal effect or admissibility as evidence solely because it is in electronic form or does not meet the qualified requirements.

So the EU position is: admissible, no presumption, weight decided on the merits. That is an ordinary place for evidence to sit, and it is where most documents live.

Italy: the law that never arrived

Italy legislated furthest and delivered least.

Article 8-ter of Law 12/2019 provides that storing a computerised document using distributed ledger technologies produces the legal effects of an electronic timestamp under eIDAS. On its face that is a significant statutory recognition.

The provision delegates the technical standards to AgID, the Agency for Digital Italy, and those standards were never issued. Without them the article is widely regarded as unimplemented, and its practical effect is far weaker than the text implies.

Cite it as evidence of legislative direction. Do not rely on it as a rule.

What this means in practice

Jurisdiction	Position	Basis
France	Accepted in a 2025 copyright judgment	TJ Marseille, 20 March 2025
EU generally	Admissible, no presumption	eIDAS Article 41(1)
EU, qualified timestamps	Presumption of date and integrity	eIDAS Article 41(2)
Italy	Statutory recognition, unimplemented	Law 12/2019, Article 8-ter

The honest summary is that a blockchain timestamp is now a normal piece of documentary evidence in Europe rather than an exotic one. It is not a registration, not a right, and not decisive on its own.

For the wider picture, including China's substantially more developed practice and the position under US evidence rules, see is a blockchain timestamp valid in court.

How to make yours count

The Marseille facts suggest the practical checklist:

Timestamp before there is a dispute — ideally at creation.
Timestamp the early versions, not just the final one. A sequence is more persuasive than a single file.
Keep the original files byte-for-byte, since you must reproduce the hash.
Use a record anyone can verify without you, so the check does not depend on a vendor still existing.

General information as of August 2026, not legal advice. Outcomes turn on the facts of each case.