How do Governments Benefit from using Blockchain?
- Building Trust with Citizens
- The Pew Research Center reports that American citizens’ trust in the government is at an all-time low
- There are many intricate reasons for this mistrust, but blockchain technology has the potential to help turn this trend around
- Transparency through decentralisation, which enables involved parties to see and validate data, is a critical component of blockchain-based solutions
- Governmental claims could be independently verified with a blockchain solution for some citizen services
- For instance, the governments of Sweden, Estonia, and Georgia are testing land registries based on blockchain technology, allowing multiple parties to safely hold copies of the registry
- Using this model, property disputes might be quickly settled or avoided altogether
- The likelihood of mistrust declines when citizens and governments share access to records
2. Protecting Sensitive Data
- In today’s digital world, personal data breaches are now commonplace
- Governments are prime targets for hackers because they are the default keeper of society’s records
- However, by properly deploying blockchain data structures, these attacks could be mitigated or prevented rather than accepted as an inevitable cost of doing business in the information age
- By lowering the risk of a single point of failure, these data structures strengthen network security and can make a breach attempt prohibitively difficult
- Government organizations are seriously pursuing blockchain applications in cybersecurity, including the Department of Homeland Security
- To carry out research and development and consider fresh perspectives on cybersecurity, DHS is funding blockchain startups
3. Reducing Costs & Improving Efficiency
- Governmental organizations must accomplish their goals while prudently allocating limited resources
- Blockchain could be a crucial lifeline for officials balancing their budgets on a razor’s edge
- Blockchain solutions have the potential to improve security, ensure data integrity, reduce redundancy, simplify processes, and ease the burden of audits
- Consider the GSA FAST Lane procedure as an example
The GSA hopes a blockchain solution will help them reach a target time of 10 days for processing incoming proposals from vendors, which currently takes 40 days
The direct costs of analyzing a proposal could be reduced by almost 80%, according to a GSA official who recently made the claim - To further demonstrate how blockchain solutions could improve efficiency, consider the federal government’s ongoing difficulty in reconciling intragovernmental transfers
- Trillions of dollars in unreconciled funds are present in the federal budget at any given time
- Budget uncertainty is caused by the time-consuming, expensive, and difficult process of reconciling these funds
- A blockchain-based payment and accounting system could offer a permanent audit trail and speed up reconciliation
DISCLOSURE:
None of these articles constitutes financial advice. Articles are highly summarised to make it easy for the reader and save your time, so please DYOR further before putting your hard-earned money into any product mentioned.
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