Argentina Organizes National Blockchain Committee to Implement State Level Strategy

The government of Argentina has designated a national blockchain committee in order to establish the directives for a state-level blockchain adoption strategy. In a document, Argentina remarks on the importance of this tech for the future and presents several use cases that would benefit from the introduction of blockchain for the digital transformation of the country.

Argentina Forms National Blockchain Committee

More and more countries are now taking a look at how the implementation of blockchain tech can improve some of their public functions. Argentina has recently issued its blockchain national guidelines.

The document, presented on Dec. 7, also creates a national blockchain committee, that will have the responsibility to “act as an interlocutor in the local blockchain ecosystem promoting the interoperability of blockchain technologies and a good government.”

The committee will be constituted by the Public Innovation Secretariat and other organizations of the state that will develop blockchain-based public policies and tech solutions. However, these other organizations that are called to be part of the committee are not detailed as part of the issued framework.

Areas of Interest

The framework issued by the government presents several uses that blockchain technology might have in aiding state-exclusive functions. The first area in which it is profiled to have uses is in auditing, given the large size and scope of some governmental structures. Blockchain is proposed as an element that will fulfill two functions in this regard: helping citizens to see how the state is investing public funds, and centralizing all of the public processes using one structure.

The second area has to do with citizen identification. The Argentine state considers that blockchain might be useful to aid in identification processes by avoiding forgeries of IDs and other documents issued by the authorities. Organizing a system around blockchain would give third parties simple ways of confirming the validity of these documents.

In this regard, there are already initiatives using blockchain for this purpose. The city of Buenos Aires is currently implementing a system called Tangoid, and expects it to be operative in January as part of a digitization push. The city will also run Ethereum nodes as an experiment to examine the inner workings of the cryptocurrency, to understand it better for regulatory purposes.