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The technology of distributed accounting books will probably find a place in the back-office, review and consultation processes of the city, before any platform aimed at citizens, says Tina Scott, one of the heads of Toronto's business application services.
"That's where we see a real opportunity for the blockchain," says Scott ITBusiness.ca.
Toronto has followed the development of the blockchain and the participation in proof-of-concept (POC) since 2017, starting from a POC with the Province of Ontario that involves restaurant licenses. The POC lasted around three months and showed a significant promise, says Scott.
Since then, the interest in the blockchain – a distributed ledger made up of blocks of information that are linked via cryptography – has spread to different city divisions, culminating in a three day training session this summer, where they have been 20 IT professionals trained and then participated in a hackathon in which City sales and technical teams met to build their own decentralized application using the Ethereum platform. This practical learning experience was achieved with the help of Blockchain Learning Group, an international team of developers that offers training sessions that emphasize the benefits of blockchain and its application to a wide range of transaction types, a concept that is implemented globally. A report by Deloitte states that governments are exploring the use of blockchains in the registration of land on all continents except Antarctica. The conversation about the blockchain at the federal level in Canada can be traced back to at least December 2016, when government officials and then international trade minister Chrystia Freeland met to discuss the technology with senior bank executives, regulators , the technology sector and other companies, according to reports by The Star.
Now, the city focuses on identifying opportunities with their planned capital projects for 2019 and 2020 that could benefit from the blockchain. Scott says that city services working in tandem with provincial ministries and other agencies are better suited for the adoption of blockchain, a point that was strengthened during a meeting with the province on 22 November.
"Right now, we are considering technology as a possible contributor to some of the capital projects that would have started in 2019 and 2020," he says. "We are not committing ourselves to using blockchain, but based on the business cases that have been presented and the benefits and business objectives that our City services want to achieve, the blockchain has been labeled as the technology to be considered."
Toronto's priorities are related to transport, civic modernization, housing and fiscal sustainability, and Scott says that any opportunity to provide these services more efficiently, for example through the use of blockchains, will be taken into account.
But exploring the capabilities of emerging technologies in the public sector can be difficult, says Sky Medel, executive director, business solutions services for the city of Toronto. Funding associated with emerging technologies is almost always directly aligned with a city service that needs modernization, so research and development opportunities are rare and instead are aligned with business-oriented investment projects.
"All targeted funding is prioritized from the top", he explains, referring to the city's executive team. "But we are confident that blockchain will be part of a lot of tools for divisions".
Ethereum platform almost all go-to
Unsurprisingly, Toronto staff are training on the Ethereum platform. Between 2008 and 2016, the global growth of startups around the blockchain grew by 18% and, as of January 2018, there were more than 40,000 applications built on the Ethereum blockchain alone, according to a Startup Genome relationship.
In a previous one interview with ITBusiness.ca, Michael H. Conn, CEO of Ether Capital, a Toronto-based technology company, says that over 94% of decentralized applications are being developed on Ethereum.
"We are starting to find companies that are having a real impact on the blockchain," says Conn. "And it's not just startups, Morgan Morgan, BMOs and others are trying to figure out how to use blockchain." You're seeing this development where private blockchains get married to Ethereum's public blockchains and this makes it more legitimate. . "
