Blockchain is in essence a distributed account book technology, which makes mutual trust among individuals unnecessary via the joint bookkeeping of all participating nodes. Since the Blockchain technology is anti-tampering, traceable, and has the timestamp, there is a promising prospect for its application to the judicial field. This has turned Blockchain into a hotspot issue of China's judicial reform. However, due to an ambiguous understanding of the development stage and strategies of the judicial application of Blockchain, there lacks an overall direction for such application. This necessitates the exploration of the development strategies for the judicial application of Blockchain in China.
The application and development of Blockchain in China's judicial practice is supported by solid technical foundation, rather than pure theoretical fantasy. In order to solve the problems of unclear strategic stage and unclear strategic focus in the development of China's Blockchain judicial application, this paper starts with the technical characteristics of Blockchain, combines with the development trend of Blockchain, existing practice and the ultimate goal of judicial application, to propose the four-stage development strategy for the judicial application of Blockchain in China. The four development stages include the Blockchain evidence collection and storage, data governance innovation, device and program interconnection, and legal coding.
Concerning the characteristics of the four-stage development strategy for judicial application of Blockchain in China, this paper proposes the implementation focuses for different strategic stages at an attempt to draw the academic circles’ attention to this research issue. For judicial practice, this paper points out the ultimate direction and stage goal for the judicial application of China's blockchain to a certain extent, so that the judicial organs can have a definite target in the process of applying Blockchain to solve disputes, so as to effectively improve judicial efficiency and promote judicial justice, and at the same time, it also opens up a new way to promote social governance innovation and enhance social governance efficiency. This study may have certain theoretical reference value for China and other countries to promote judicial reform with the help of Blockchain.