Inteligencia artificial y blockchain en el notariado ecuatoriano
Abstract
[Purpose] This article analyzes the institutional barriers constraining the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain in Ecuador's notarial system, understood as components of the digital transformation of public services dependent on telecommunications infrastructure. It aims to identify and characterize such barriers, assess their comparative severity against the Brazilian case, and formulate analytical propositions on the viability conditions for notarial digital transformation. [Methodology/approach/design] A documentary socio-legal design with a comparative component was adopted, articulating two corpora: a scientific corpus derived from a scoping review following PRISMA-ScR guidelines (38 sources, 2017–2026) and a regulatory-institutional corpus comprising 18 official documents from the Ecuadorian Judiciary Council, the Comptroller General, the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, Brazilian bodies (CNJ and CNB/CF), and supranational organizations. The functional comparison with Brazil was operationalized using scalar indicators across six dimensions. [Findings] Of 38 academic sources included, 14 directly address the notarial voluntary function, revealing a significant technological asymmetry: 12 address blockchain and only 2 address artificial intelligence. AI is concentrated in contentious judicial function (75% of AI sources) while blockchain is concentrated in the strict voluntary notarial function (66.7% of blockchain sources). Ecuador's system accumulates transversal barriers: full self-financing with documented income asymmetries between notarial types, generalized provisional appointments (85.0% of notaries under extended-term status), and absence of centralized digital infrastructure. Brazil constitutes the only analyzed jurisdiction with a specific and systematic regulatory framework for electronic notarial acts (Provimento 100/2020 CNJ), associated with growth in e-Notariado. [Practical implications] The findings provide grounds for designing regulatory frameworks for notarial digital transformation in civil-law jurisdictions, particularly regarding the articulation of regulatory and technological infrastructure as a combined precondition for adoption. The dependency of digitalized notarial services on telecommunications infrastructure confers sectoral regulatory relevance to these findings within the domain of telecommunications and networked public services regulation. [Originality/value] The contribution lies in the formulation of three operationalized analytical propositions derived from exclusively documentary sources that transform descriptive observations into testable hypotheses. The study documents a previously uncharacterized pattern in the literature: a functional dichotomy in research on emerging technologies applied to legal functions, where the AI × notarial voluntary function intersection remains virtually empty despite being conceptually central to evaluating the automation of judgment on capacity and consent.