BLOCKCHAIN IMPACT

BLOCKCHAIN IMPACT

2.1 Global policies
In the last years, the distributed ledger technology constitutes an important topic of research and interest at institutional, national and global level, such initiatives are presented in this section.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has a Blockchain Community Group (https://www.w3.org/community/blockchain), with the scope to study and evaluate new technologies and use cases related to blockchain, showing the W3C’s intention to become more involved with distributed ledger technology as a foundational element of tomorrow’s web. In June 2016, the group and MIT Media Lab organized the exploratory W3C Workshop on Distributed Ledgers on the Web, to determine opportunities and timelines for blockchain standardization (Prisco, 2016).

The European Commission (EC) considers blockchain as a strategic technology and encourages governments, European industry and citizens to benefit from blockchain opportunities. The EC organized an information day on 19 December 2017 to explain the different topics related to blockchain and distributed ledger technologies in the Horizon 2020 Work Programme and Fintech cooperation actions (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/news/information-day-19-december-2017-horizon-2020-blockchain-distributed-ledger-technologies-topics). The EC aims to develop a common approach on blockchain technology for the EU in the international arena, thus in February 2018, the EU Blockchain Observatory and Forum (http://www.eublockchainforum.eu) was launched, in order to become a knowledge hub on blockchain, to map relevant blockchain initiatives, to share experiences and pool expertise on blockchain and its related challenges, to promote European actors, and to organise debates at the EU level. Also, the results of a study on the opportunity to pilot a EU Blockchain Infrastructure (EuroChain) for the advent of an open, innovative, trustworthy, transparent,
and EU law compliant data and transactional environment are expected in 2018 (https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/blockchain-technologies).

2.2 Application domains
A lot of countries and governments are starting to fund projects and to place regulations on the blockchain technology; Estonia, USA, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Australia, North Korea, Canada, UK, The Netherlands, Malta are among the countries that support digital currency (Smolenski, 2017; Levis, 2018; Nelson, 2018; DF, 2018).

The blockchain technology is deeply interlinked with the foundations of society, government, economy, education, culture, charity and even identity, reconsidering fundamental questions such as “what is the definition of value?” or “what does society look like when authority is decentralized?” (Obrist and Chu, 2018). Moreover, blochchain is categorized in the top ten strategic technology trends which will disrupt business in the next five years, constituting an intelligent digital mesh, which entwines people, devices, content and services (Panetta, 2017).

Initially predominant in the financial sector, taking advantage of its unique characteristics presented before - such as being able to replace trust‐based systems, blockchain has the potential to become a significant source of disruption. Thus, innovative applications have been already implemented in a lot of domains, such as: humanitarian projects, business, management, finance, banking, cryptocurrency, Internet of Things, education, smart property, energy, healthcare, digital identity, Machine Learning, digital notary, food industry and agriculture, transport, carrier services, mobile parking, social media networks, distributed cloud storage, travel, sport or games (Holotiuk et al., 2017; White, 2017; Sumeet, 2017; Zambrano, 2017; Blechschmidt, 2018). An interesting insight into the blockchain impact in different domains is provided by an interactive map of global transformations, the key issued being considered: Decentralized Asset Management, Economic and Social Structures, Financial Products and Services, Identity and Persona Management, Governance and Law, Environmental Sustainability (WEF, 2018). In Romania, there is an important interest for cryptocurrency, exchange and ATM network operators exist, and startups, events, publications related to blockchain appeared lately, in spite of the lack of governmental regulations and initiatives.