Cities Deploy Blockchain – Is It The Real Deal?

blockchain a smart city enabler or a marketing fad simply put blockchain is described as a database where information is stored and securely exchanged without the burden of a gatekeeper everybody who is part of a transaction on the blockchain are all receiving the data at the same time also a really big part of it is what's called the immutability of the data right so Information stored on the blockchain cannot be deleted, cannot be altered. In recent years, we've seen a number of cities explore blockchain applications that go beyond crypto, but few, if any, have scaled. In Seoul, a pilot project deployed in 2021, used blockchain to securely store and analyze data from IoT devices installed on walls inside old buildings. Those devices measured cracks on walls and other safety concerns. related to a decayed building. The system sent alerts when it spotted a risk. And then you have Dubai, a city that famously declared in 2016 that it will be fully powered by blockchain come 2020. But six years later, that work continues. Instead, we've seen siloed applications deployed in specific departments, like the use of digital identity to issue licenses and vehicle registrations. Now, across those use cases, you have to wonder, Was blockchain always necessary? That's the thing. I mean, if it really comes down to an append -only ledger, you could still do cryptographic hashing in an existing RDD &S. Mark Wheeler is the chief information officer with the city of Philadelphia. He's been exploring the use of blockchain applications for years, and he's a pretty good idea of how the technology could be a fit for his city. I think that there's a very simple, straightforward... forward application of it right now that we could do, and I'm looking at adding it to our request for proposal processes when we do our next round of a smart city pilot using street sensors. So when you're putting sensors in the street, whether it's video cameras, LiDAR sensors, and you're doing things like counting individuals, counting bikes, you have to be sensitive to privacy issues. So any of those visual records of what's happening on the sidewalk isn't retained anywhere. only thing that we have are counts. I think that layering in a blockchain database that's defensible, that's append only, that can't be edited by anyone in city government or even the solution providers who gave us the sensors on the street, we could show those records and have them available in a website or app to say that the data is definitely being deleted. But because blockchain is a foundational technology, we've requiring applications be purpose -built for the platform, it's not so easy to deploy. We don't have lots and lots of software developers in the marketplace who know what this technology is and how best to utilize it. And then, you know, for cities, some things are managed service providers. It's not clear at all to me that the Web3 industry is at the point that they can be a managed service provider for one or more city governments at this point and deliver it. at a 24-7 service level agreement. So when I heard about the latest blockchain pilot here in the United States, I was excited to learn more. The city of Reno is testing a blockchain platform by the New York City-based firm, Blockapps, to manage its historic building registry. A lot of the data that we have put on this blockchain was previously in bankers' boxes. So there's definitely an improvement to make this, this, this... this information, not onl anyone could request that information, but make it e could easily just go on, on the property that they and see the history of th Now, Reno will deploy the this month and it will do compliments of black apps. upload data into the block appear in a portal for the officials to view and me a on there and say, okay, we did receive that new application. Let's send it next off to the Historic Resources Commission to review. After that, the mayor can sign off on it to say, yes, that's okay. And then after that, the clerk will put that in as a public record that they will be making the alterations to that building. Block Apps was founded in 2015. It has since raised around $44 million from investors. It operates the blockchain as a service platform straight out. straight out sits in the cloud customers use a platform to deploy blockchain applications related to data tracking data access and data ownership now the historic building registry represents a first step future applications could look something like this a platform that stores and monitors and shares data from iot devices and combines that information with the manual uploads this platform here tracks carbon emissions this is a solution developed by block apps The goal is to create a marketplace for retrofit activity in buildings. Forecasts can be used to create retrofit recommendations and generate bids from contractors. Regulators can then validate the retrofit activity once a bid is completed. Block apps could ultimately be the type of company that might provide something to a city where our technology really sat underneath all of their other technology, enabling all of the data to feed into it. So Jeff Stratto is a... private blockchain also known as an enterprise blockchain this compares to the other public blockchains we see in the market so what's the difference here what's the value in using a private blockchain so there's different levels of control over who can access the information who can see it and it also by design is a low energy consumptive uh system when we're talking about allowing the public to see all of this data that's great And we did want to look at the different types of blockchain technology we could use for that. But the enterprise blockchain allowed us allowed for us to create administrators or create other missions so that city staff would be able to make alterations to things on our blockchain that others might not be able to. But if there's a network operator managing access and control over the data, doesn't that make it centralized rather than decentralized? And is it then really blocked? I took the question to Jesse Anglin, he's a CEO and co -founder of Rapid Innovation. This is a company that develops blockchain applications. If you strip too much of the blockchain functionality out of it, then the criticism that you just talked about becomes true. Like you might as well just use a cloud service. But there are things that we've done in the past, architectures that we've used that actually minimize some of that and still give the benefit. of a private blockchain like for instance you can take the state of a private blockchain you can hash that state and you can stuff it into a block on a public blockchain therefore creating an immutable record of the data in time so jesse from your work are you seeing a lot of iot integrations or is most of the data manually uploaded to databases a lot of it is manually inserted although there are some pretty big pushes currently in the space right now to actually get IOT integrated blockchains, and I think until you find companies that actually specialize in both, you're not going to see a ton of I mean, we're the internet in 1989 right now, if you want to make the comparison. We've got another 10 years left before the technology really advances to the point where you see it have that global impact. So perhaps Dubai will have to wait a little longer to be fully powered by blockchain. But in the meantime, I'm sure we'll see a ton of new innovation come out of that city and many others. So be sure to follow along right here on Current Insight for more updates.