An India Blockchain Platform
- India has made a significant effort to become a digital society by building a large citizen-scale digital public infrastructure.
- With Digital India mission in 2015, our payments, provident fund, passports, driving licences, crossing tolls, and checking land records all have been transformed with modular applications built on Aadhaar, UPI, and the India Stack.
- The Government of India and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have been promoting simplification and transparency to increase the speed of interaction between individuals, markets, and the government.
What are the Limitations of public digital infrastructure:
- Digital infrastructure should be designed based on principles of availability, affordability, value, and trust
- The current digital ecosystem identified that existing different digital infrastructures are not interconnected as a design; a technical integration is required to make them conversant and interoperable
- Most of available digital data is stored on private databases, which makes the validation of data more complex as the network grows, driving up costs and creating inefficiencies.
Increasing global adoption of blockchain infrastructure
- By 2023, 35% of enterprise blockchain applications will be integrated with decentralized applications and services. Many countries have already begun establishing their blockchain policies and infrastructure.
- Estonia: world’s blockchain capital, is using blockchain infrastructure to verify and process all e-governance services offered to the general public.
- Britain: The University of Cambridge and the UK government is running the National Digital Twin program (NDTp) to foster collaboration between owners and developers of digital twins in the built environment
- There are also well-established decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms that rely on blockchain infrastructure like Ethereum, however, pegged to the base cryptocurrencies owned by that platform.
The digital roads that India must build using blockchain
- The Indian digital community, including fintechs, academia, think tanks, and institutions, should focus on
- Supporting research in standards,
- Interoperability
- Efficient handling of current known issues with the distributed technologies,
- E.g., scalability and performance, consensus mechanisms, and auto-detection of vulnerabilities
Current regulation mechanism and what need to be done?
- The ideal solution to solving most of the known issues of decentralised technologies lies in the middle path, i.e., a national platform operating at L1 that interconnects.
- Blockchains (both permissioned and public),
- Application providers (decentralized applications — dApps — and existing),
- Token service providers, and infrastructure managers.
Conclusion:
- The need of the hour is to work on an indigenous solution of the people, for the people, and by the people, An India Blockchain Platform even if it takes years to design and implement.
- A digital infrastructure based on blockchain technology will transform the digital ecosystem in India, and will enable the future of digital services, platforms, applications, content, and solutions.
- Considering the current state of affairs worldwide, one can safely assume that we are at the beginning of the curve, but the days are not far.