Countries which have embraced Blockchain in the Government sector.
Introduction
The cryptocurrencies in this modern world have become one of the primary means to undertake all the financial transactions. It has incentivized the whole financial economy around the corner globe which has rendered it to become a staunch enemy of the centralized banks of various countries. This automatically follows that the government of different countries are eagerly looking for an opportunity to get the cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology under their control and if they aren’t able to do so, would at least try to completely void its usage in their respective countries.
Prominent Countries which have adopted Blockchain Technology
In a nutshell, there are many countries around the world which try to restrict the usage of cryptocurrencies but on the other hand, the underlying Technology for the cryptocurrencies which is the blockchain technology is welcomed with open hands by the government of the various countries around the world because of its amazing working methodology. Some of the countries like Sweden, Denmark, United States, United Arab Emirates, Malta, Singapore, etc have initiated Blockchain research and development industries, in order to explore its use cases. According to reports, it is estimated that there are more than 200 government ventures, under collaboration with the Blockchain Technology in 45 different countries around the world.
Major areas of interest
Most of the Blockchain development in the public sector is with respect to Research, Identity credentials like attestation or licensing, land title ownership, personal records like Healthcare, economic, as well as the financial structure. Although most of the ventures are in their developmental stages, or rather technically known to be in the form of Pilot projects, there is also a number of nations which has conducted their Senate election process on the Blockchain Technology in an easy and a transparent way. Below are insights on some of the prominent Blockchain initiatives by various countries.
Denmark
The Government of Denmark has initiated a Blockchain project named, Vehicle wallet. It is nothing but powering the Supply Chain Management process of a vehicle with the Blockchain Technology, under which a Proof of Work concept is being implemented on the digital assets to handle the complete lifecycle of the vehicle.
Estonia
The European country Estonia has been concentrating on the Blockchain research and development since 2008 and is currently been able to deploy the Blockchain based solutions for Healthcare, the judicial system, security, as well as the legislation domains.
Georgia
Land titling has been one of the longest unsolved problems, for which the Blockchain Technology provides an effective answer. The Government of Georgia through the joint venture of the IT service company, The Bitfury group along with National Agency of Public Registry (NAPR) has been experimenting with the land titling project with respect to the Blockchain Technology. The blockchain concepts have been successfully implemented within the digital record system of NAPR. The Distributed Ledger along with the Time Stamping Technology has rendered NAPR for an efficient land titling process, which was earlier used to take a lot of time and also was expensive. The online and digitized nature of the Blockchain technology has made the land titling process available to a number of unprivileged and illiterate citizens who are restricted from the land titling system.
Singapore
Even the Central bank of Singapore, popularly known as The Monetary Authority of Singapore, has consistently been working on Project Ubin. The main goal of the project is to develop a Blockchain based solution to track all the transactions of the Singapore Dollars. The bank has collaborated with a major firm like R3, which itself is a collaboration if more than 200 financial firms, vesting with the research and development of the distributed ledger. This project would enable the transactions to be undertaken all the time and the decentralized nature would automatically deploy trust within the system.
Bottlenecks in implementation
Regardless of all the developments in the field, the governments are still struggling to successfully implement them into their operational processes. With illicit activities like money laundering, hacks, and scams, the cyber security experts of the government are speculative about the disruptive side of the technology too. In some of the cases, the key members in the government sector, fail to understand the Blockchain technology completely and hence are uncertain about future results of its adoption. In a nutshell, they would rather be slow in adopting the technology even though they possess a greater potential. After all, it is self-evident from the fluctuating cryptocurrency market, that how vulnerable the technology can be, to the market conditions.
