The Biodiversity Beyond National Jurisdiction (BBNJ) Agreement marks a historic shift in the law of the sea: States have committed to a legally binding regime for the fair and equitable sharing of benefits arising from marine genetic resources (MGRs) of areas beyond national jurisdiction (ABNJ). However, the text of the treaty alone will not deliver these outcomes. What remains critically underdeveloped is the infrastructure, both technical and institutional, that can translate legal commitments into operational mechanisms.
This Article identifies a core implementation challenge: how to make Article 14’s benefit-sharing regime functional in practice. Article 14 establishes a legal obligation to ensure the fair and equitable distribution of both monetary and non-monetary benefits arising from the utilisation of MGRs collected in ABNJ. By grounding these obligations in the collective interest of humanity over resources located in the global commons, the provision embeds a principle of equity within the treaty framework. The benefit-sharing regime thus functions as a normative and operational instrument to support the overarching objectives of the BBNJ Agreement: the conservation and sustainable use of marine biodiversity beyond national jurisdiction. We argue that the future of the BBNJ clearing-house mechanism (ClHM), established under Article 51, must serve as the treaty’s digital backbone, providing the provenance tracking, data transparency, and compliance capabilities necessary to render Article 14’s benefit-sharing regime functional in practice. Drawing on two working models–Brazil’s SISGen (National System for the Management of Genetic Heritage and Associated Traditional Knowledge) platform and Intellectual Property Non-Fungible Tokens (IP-NFTs)–we explore tools that could inform the ClHM’s development. We close with specific design questions for consideration during the second session of the BBNJ Preparatory Commission, starting 18 August 2025.
Legal Innovation: The Promise of Article 14
At the heart of the BBNJ Agreement lies a bold legal innovation: States are placed under a concrete and enforceable obligation to share the benefits arising from the utilisation of MGRs collected in ABNJ. Article 14 introduces a dual-track benefit-sharing regime that encompasses both non-monetary and monetary dimensions. On the one hand, it requires the provision of non-monetary benefits such as access to scientific data, capacity-building initiatives, and the transfer of technologies. On the other hand, it mandates that monetary benefits, once specific thresholds of commercialisation or revenue are reached, be channelled into a dedicated international fund, as set out in Article 52.
Yet this formal innovation gives rise to a persistent legal challenge: how can one reliably determine when the use of a genetic sample collected (or its digital sequence information) on ABNJ results in a benefit that is significant enough to activate the obligations established under the agreement? Without robust mechanisms for traceability, transparent disclosure, and verifiable enforcement, the core objective of equity risks remains aspirational. The effectiveness of Article 14, therefore, hinges not merely on normative clarity but on the existence of a supportive technical and institutional ecosystem capable of translating legal rights into actual redistribution.
From Legal Text to Technical System: The Role of the ClHM
The ClHM is envisioned as the core of the treaty’s benefit-sharing system. Its role is to register all activities involving MGRs, assign a standardised batch identifier to each collection, and link that identifier to relevant information regarding access, utilisation, and resulting benefits.
According to the UN Doc. A/AC.296/2025/6, the ClHM is featured by four foundational design features. Firstly, the system is expected to include tiered permission levels to manage user access according to role and responsibility. Secondly, it must enable technical interoperability through technical links (e.g., APIs), allowing integration with existing data repositories and institutional platforms. In addition, its architecture is to be deployed in phases, allowing gradual implementation and adjustment. Finally, the mechanism must be accessible under low-bandwidth conditions, an essential requirement for enabling effective participation by developing states.
These technical elements, although foundational, are not sufficient in themselves. What remains notably absent from current planning is a coherent operational blueprint, one that articulates how the ClHM would function end-to-end, from the notification of a cruise to collect a genetic sample to the triggering of benefit-sharing obligations. This includes not only questions of metadata standards and system security, but also how obligations are to be embedded within scientific and commercial workflows. To address these uncertainties, real-world digital governance systems, such as national access platforms and emerging blockchain-based licensing frameworks, offer instructive analogies.
National Traceability as a Foundation
The Brazilian platform named ‘SISGen’, established under Law 13.123/2015, has had a direct conceptual influence on the BBNJ Agreement, most notably on the inclusion of the ‘access code’ requirement for MGR notification in Article 51. While SISGen was developed as a national mechanism for tracking access to genetic heritage and traditional knowledge, its practical operation offers critical insights for designing the ClHM under the BBNJ framework.
What makes SISGen valuable in the context of BBNJ is not simply its regulatory architecture, but the proof that digital identifiers can serve as legal anchors across fragmented scientific and commercial workflows. The Brazilian experience demonstrates that requiring a time-stamped access registration, linked to any subsequent use, including publications and patent filings, can both enable traceability and institutionalise benefit-sharing compliance without disrupting innovation. In particular, the SISGen requires users to declare intellectual property outcomes, such as patent applications or licensing, within the access registration process, thereby establishing a functional link to the national IP framework. Although this does not constitute full technical interoperability with the Brazilian patent office (INPI), it demonstrates how a digital clearing-house can interface with broader systems of intellectual property governance through regulatory coordination. This integration provides a model for how the ClHM could trigger disclosure obligations in downstream processes, such as sequence deposits, data-sharing platforms, or commercial licensing, based on an initial batch identifier issued at the point of collection.
The relevance of SISGen is thus twofold: it reflects a national experience that informed regional proposals during the BBNJ negotiations, particularly regarding notification requirements and monetary benefit-sharing, and it provides a scalable, operational template for linking legal obligations to real-world research and innovation practices. While implementation in the ABNJ presents distinct challenges, the Brazilian model confirms that digital provenance systems can be deployed at the national level and adapted for use in multilateral frameworks. As the CBD Ad Hoc Technical Expert Group on DSI has highlighted, centralised, standards-based registration mechanisms significantly reduce complexity and increase compliance (CBD/WG2020/5/CRP.7), two outcomes that the ClHM must also deliver.
Embedding Legal Conditions via Smart Contracts
The IP-NFT merges private legal licensing instruments with blockchain-enabled automation to create enforceable, transparent rights structures. Functionally, an IP-NFT constitutes a digital asset that encapsulates specific intellectual property entitlements within a tokenised structure governed by smart contracts. Rather than merely recording ownership, this architecture operationalises legal obligations by embedding them directly into the asset’s metadata, enabling automated compliance responses upon pre-defined triggers. As such, IP-NFTs introduce a programmable compliance layer that integrates legal enforceability, auditability, and traceability into the circulation of digital genetic assets. This model has the potential to recalibrate how benefit-sharing is implemented across transnational innovation chains, offering a legally robust and technologically interoperable tool for linking upstream access to downstream obligations.
In a BBNJ-related scenario, IP-NFTs could encode obligations from Article 14 directly into private legal instruments. If BBNJ batch identifiers (ID) were embedded in the token metadata, a smart contract could automatically trigger monetary contributions to the Article 52 fund upon commercial milestones. Non-monetary commitments, such as training programmes or data sharing, could be built into licence terms and audited via the blockchain record. It enables the creation of immutable audit trails, documenting the entire lifecycle of an MGR from collection through to commercialisation. This supports legal accountability and reinforces trust in the system. Furthermore, the structure is inherently interoperable with open-access scientific databases, enabling seamless information-sharing and oversight. Finally, the integration of smart contracts allows for the automatic enforcement of financial and non-financial obligations, reducing reliance on ex post legal enforcement and improving compliance certainty.
However, legal uncertainty surrounds the regulatory status of such tokens, particularly whether they may be classified as securities under domestic law. Risks include smart contract failures, loss of access keys, and privacy issues. Another area of critique relates to the environmental footprint of blockchain technologies, especially early proof-of-work systems known for their high energy consumption. Yet technological advancements in blockchain architecture, most notably the shift to energy-efficient consensus mechanisms like proof-of-stake, have reduced these concerns. The International Energy Agency, in its ‘Tracking Clean Energy Progress: Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Energy Use’, notes that modern blockchain networks can now reach energy efficiency levels comparable to large-scale cloud computing infrastructure.
Looking Ahead: Questions for PrepCom2
As PrepCom2 starts today, a central challenge looms: whether the ClHM can be designed in a way that truly operationalises the treaty’s commitment to equity in benefit-sharing. This will require addressing several unresolved legal and technical questions. What form should the metadata architecture take, and who will assign and validate the MGR batch ID? How will those identifiers persist across research outputs, patent applications, or licensing instruments? And under what conditions is a benefit considered to be “derived” for the purposes of triggering Article 14 obligations?
Equally important is the question of integration: can the ClHM safely interface with private-sector tools such as IP-NFTs without compromising public oversight or transparency? How will the system balance open access with protections for sensitive or proprietary information, especially in light of emerging debates around digital sequence information (DSI), where the traceability of data rather than material samples becomes the core compliance challenge?
These are not merely technical details. They strike at the heart of whether the BBNJ regime can avoid the fate of past commons governance efforts that failed to deliver on their normative promises. Article 14’s innovation lies not in proclaiming a right to share benefits, but in requiring that those benefits materialise through traceable, enforceable mechanisms. For that to happen, the ClHM must be more than a digital database. It must operate as a translational interface between legal obligations and real-world innovation systems. By drawing from national precedents such as SISGen and integrating programmable, interoperable tools, States can build a governance infrastructure capable of enabling compliance across both material and digital domains. Whether PrepCom2 becomes the moment when this vision moves from concept to code remains to be seen, but the institutional foundations must be laid now.
Julia Schutz Veiga is a PhD candidate at NOVA Law School, UNL, and a visiting fellow at the Ocean Voices Programme, University of Edinburgh. Schutz-Veiga has served as an advisor to the Brazilian delegation in the BBNJ negotiations and on the preparatory committee. The arguments in this blog post represent Schutz-Veiga’s personal views and may not reflect Brazil’s official positions.
Henrique Marcos is an Lecturer at Maastricht University Faculty of Law and a Researcher at the Centre for Studies on the Law of the Sea of the University of São Paulo (CEDMAR-USP). He holds a double PhD from the Universities of Maastricht and São Paulo in legal theory and international law.