Building Blockchain-led Cities of the Future

The world around us is quickly evolving. The pace of innovation has been immense in the last few years; cloud computing, virtual reality, 3D printing, artificial intelligence, Blockchain etc., the list of recent experimentations is endless.

But one innovation that has been pegged as a modern day game changer is Blockchain. A technology that is being compared to the birth of the internet, Blockchain has the potential to evolve economies and take cities into the future.

First Questions First:

But the questions are why is Blockchain a city/state led initiative? Why do we need to do things on such a big scale? Why shouldn’t we work in silos and build up momentum towards bigger implementations.

There is a simple answer to all these questions, to successfully launch a truly blockchain led project, you need to have a drive from the top. A drive to build a system or a series of systems that truly harness the potential of the Blockchain.

You need a technology that isn’t just a buzzword, or showboating but an endeavor to launch an ecosystem of awareness and openness, to connect systems and build interoperability. You cant have a Blockchain based system built in isolation, you need collaboration with partners, with entities such as public-private consortiums.

Building Cities of Tomorrow:

We’ve established that when it comes to adoption it has to be driven from the top. Any success be it big or small has been made when the right stakeholders have come together to accept it and to help deliver it.

Blockchain is no different, it is a truly transformative innovation that can evolve fields like transportation, healthcare, tourism and hospitality, education, telecommunication etc. We’ve just scratched the surface of what the technology has the power to evolve, but we’ve been able to ascertain that we need to move from ideation to implementation if we want to build a decentralized world of the future.

When we examine any one of the fields we’ve listed above we see that they are made up of their own customer journeys. Be it booking an appointment, to waiting in line, to verifying documents to opening an account. Each one of these customer journeys can be improved and can be evolved by the Blockchain.

At Avanza Innovations we spend most of time championing public-private sector use cases. We do this to bring the Blockchain into the limelight and move it from the lab environment Into mainstream implementation.

Lets Talk Shop:

At Avanza we realized early on that a vision and will from the top was absolutely critical to move our mission of Blockchain implementations forward. Fortunately we were sitting in one of the worlds most innovative cities, Dubai.

Gearedto innovate, Dubai is on a mission to become the Blockchain capital of the world. In line with the Dubai Blockchain Strategy, announced by H.H. Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and Chairman of The Executive Council, which mandates that Dubai becomes the world’s first-ever government to execute all applicable transactions using blockchain technology by 2020.

That is why we’ve been a part of their drive to take the the government sector forward powered by nascent technologies like Bockchain. Avanza in partnership with the Smart Dubai Office has helped deliver the regions first reconciliation and settlement engine on Blockchain. This solution allows Dubai city’s Department of Finance to settle funds with their affiliated entities seamlessly - the process would usually take up to 40 days but with a Blockchain based ‘reconciliation and settlement’ engine we reduced friction and built a transparent, immutable system that is efficient.

We have also developed a first of its kind Blockchain Orchestration and Governance platform called ‘Cipher’, in the near future multiple organizations will be running multiple Blockchain projects on multiple Blockchain stacks (Hyperleder, Ehtereum, Quorum etc.). Our platform will be able to navigate this vast ocean of diversity and help keep systems up and running. This is essential since organizations need confidence when they want to move their core systems on to the blockchain

A Glimpse of the Future:

Going back to the big picture, the decentralization movement is all about building trust, transparency and efficiency. The challenge right now is to look at what is being done on a global front and rally industry players around next-gen Blockchain use-cases and POCs. As a company we are working delivering blockchain solutions on property leasing and smart mortgage chains, KYC chains, National and Regional level Bank Trust Networks, tokenization of loyalty points within a large consortiums of merchants, procure to pay (P2P) solutions for up-stream Oil & Gas companies as well and government procurement authorities and many more private-permissioned blockchain solutions across numerous verticals and sectors.

It is up to everyone to lend their support to the cause. Be it banks, FI’s government and private sector firms, technology providers, developers etc. to their their voice to the cause. The cause to evolve the way we transact, share information, store records, and access data; all while maximizing transparency and establishing trust.