A couple of days ago, DIACC (Digital ID & Authentication Council of Canada) together with IBM Canada and the Province of British Columbia released information about a PoC (Proof of Concept) for moving corporate registrations to a blockchain-based register. The PoC, which used the Hyperledger Fabric, was for both corporate registries of a single province and across multiple jurisdictions.
Such registries, be it corporate registries, land register, or other types of decentralized ledgers, are the sweet spot for blockchains. Registration is decentralized. The registries and ledgers must be tamper-resistant. The data must be sequenced and, in many cases, time-stamped. All these are the fundamental characteristics of blockchains. Simply said: It is far easier to construct solutions for such registries and ledgers based on blockchain technology than it is based on traditional technologies such as relational databases.
Here, the use case and the solution fit perfectly well. Given that improving such registries and other ledgers can have a massive economic and societal impact, it also proves the value of blockchains, well beyond cryptocurrencies. Blockchains are here to stay, and I expect to see a strong uptake of use cases around registers and ledgers in the next couple of years – beyond PoCs towards practical, widely deployed and used implementations. Honestly, every investment in IT solutions for such registers etc. should be revisited, evaluating whether stopping it and restarting based on blockchains isn’t the better choice nowadays. In most cases it will turn out that blockchains are the better choice.