In 2021, the fish market in the Port of Celeiro (Lugo), sold close to five million kilos of skewer hake with the Friends of the Sea certification, a seal that guarantees that its capture has been carried out without significant impact on the seabed, in stocks not overexploited, under criteria of social responsibility…
These are demanding fishing conditions that many buyers value, even if they have to pay up to 7% more for the product. A justified overprice, but that could raise doubts in those same buyers. What could the Port do to assure them that they were paying more for a superior product and that they were not being given hare for hake?
The answer to the dilemma was blockchain. Allied with the Lberit and IBM technologies, the Port transferred all the information of its premium product to this new environment so that, With a QR, any client could know all the details about its capture, certification, storage, sale…
TRACEABILITY AND IMMUTABILITY
That traceability of the entire life cycle of a product or process It is one of the main virtues that the chain of blocks contributes to information recording technologies.
Another is immutability. Any operation performed on blockchain it is a block cryptographically linked with the previous block, with the subsequent block and with the author of said operation. And if someone tries to cancel or modify it, they will only be able to do so by generating a new block in the chain, so there will be a record of the change and who made it and when.
In addition, all those blocks integrate a large database replicated on countless computers, which is an added difficulty if you intend to make a great change. Even if I want to hack the information in one of the nodes, it won’t be synchronized if I don’t also hack 51% of the nodes, explains Ismael Astudillo, director of custom projects at Lberit. Truth is what most nodes confirm to be the truth.
HOW CAN ‘BLOCKCHAIN’ END CORRUPTION?
The question that is being asked by more and more national and international organizations, such as the World Economic Forum or the OECD, is whether all these qualities of knowledge could be used. blockchain to short-cut bidding and other processes of the public administration to reduce cases of corruption in the world.
It is a revolution at the compliance level, confirms Hermgenes Montalvo, director of Compliance, Blockchain, Cryptoactives and Business Tokenization at the Bemylaw Abogados law firm. Any technology can be used illegally, but it allows tracking and traceability, thus it is more difficult to be corrupt, because sooner or later they will catch youhe argues.
A revolution that could allow one trillion euros to pass, throughout the world, from the pockets of venal politicians and officials to the projects, benefits and services that taxpayers benefit from. That is, at least, the amount dedicated to bribery according to the World Bank, which estimates that business operations carried out all over the planet become 10% more expensive on average as a result of these fraudulent practices. 25% in the case of developing countries.
BIDS WITH ‘SMART CONTRACTS’
But How can the technology be used? blockchain to make the rackets and compromises more difficult of all kinds that are made with everyone’s money? Based on this reliability that the data has not been manipulated and this traceability of the process, you can build many applications, mainly with three functions: thetokenization [la representacin virtual de valor para su posterior transmisin digital]; digital identity systems that could be used in voting or in procedures with the administration; and the smart contracts answers Almudena de la Mata, CEO of the Blockchain Intelligence consultancy.
The smart contracts they are just that: smart contracts in which, in addition to the clauses that commit the parties, programs capable of self-executing are included when certain conditions are met, which could streamline and provide full transparency to public tenders.
And that’s just what I was looking for the Government of Aragon when it launched in 2019 an ecosystem blockchain for its contests and which, for example, allowed the region to stock up on masks in the midst of a pandemic with a fully traceable process. A type of award, for example, that was surrounded by controversy in the Community of Madrid.
It allows a small company to present a document and have it sealed with its timestamp (the date encoded in the corresponding block), raises Montalvo. When the designated day arrives, all offers are automatically opened and can be seen by anyone, so wins the one who has really presented the besthe adds.
According to this expert, the smart contracts They have one more advantage in this type of adjudication. Europe can tell you that it gives you 180,000 million, but it can ask you that they will be released as the project is executedexemplified.
In addition, these automatisms could help the administration to be faster and less cumbersome. As soon as a technician validates that a certain condition has been met, the process begins to solve all the bureaucracy, Astudillo emphasizes. With the added advantage that If a contract does not comply with what was promised in a tender, you make sure that the penalties are executed.
THE CASE OF COLOMBIA AND GEORGIA
One of the pioneering initiatives in this sense was developed in Colombia by the World Economic Forum. In this pilot experience he moved to blockchain the selection of contracts for school canteens in the countrywhich historically had been a focus of corruption and scandal: companies were paid, but often children from disadvantaged families did not receive food.
Another country that has bet heavily on the chain of blocks is Georgia, where bribes were used to speed up the slow bureaucracy of Communist-influenced land registration. After the Revolution of the Roses (2003), the country cut its losses with corruption in this field and began a path of reforms that has culminated in the successful use of blockchain. In operations in which there is a lack of trust or a greater contribution of reliability is needed, these decentralized records make the most sense, defends Almudena de la Mata.
And the same can be said of the passes: those in which corruption is most rampant are the ones who can benefit most from it. blockchain. Although, paradoxically, it is in those countries where it is most difficult to build a chain of blocks that works with all the guarantees that it is supposed to.
LIMITATIONS AND LACK OF WILL
Not for putting the name blockchain to any network, immutability, reliability and traceability are guaranteed, warns the CEO of Blockchain Intelligence. If you only have five replicas of your database it is easier to manipulate it than if you have 100,000; and if those five nodes know each other and have similar incentives to manipulate information, it can lead them to modify the database in the same direction, he continues.
Hence, it is essential that the media and citizens actively participate in the opportunities that this technology will offer them to Supervise the actions of administrations, companies and individuals. But will ordinary citizens have problems dealing with this new technology?
At the user level, access to blockchain It is through a transparency portal or a QR that the user can scan to find out everything about the resolution of a public tender or the execution of a work, clarifies the director of customized projects at Lberit. If that doesn’t happen, the auditing of these processes will be in the hands of the one who wins the contest, so we will be in the same situation, he warns.
In fact, as De la Mata points out, one of the applications being tested takes advantage of the cryptography blockchain to protect and encourage whistle blowerswhistleblowers of certain fraudulent or unethical practices.
But if the advantages for citizens are so evident, why aren’t more administrations implementing it? Spain, out of prudence, approved in 2019 a decree-law that rejected the use of distributed records as long as they are not subject to specific regulation by the State within the framework of EU Law.
The latter, on the other hand, is driving them intensely. In 2017, the European Blockchain Partnership was approved, which is an intergovernmental agreement to support this technology both with regulation and by generating its own technology: the European Blockchain Service Infrastructure (EBSI), explains De la Mata. Thanks to this platform, cross-border recognition of academic titles will be possible (another area where we have seen corruption flourish) and in terms of social security.
Will citizens soon enjoy the same guarantees as the clients of the Port of Celeiro? We have the tool, what is needed is political willemphasizes Hermogenes Montalvo.
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