Dubai Wants to Become the World’s First Blockchain-Powered Government by 2020

| Updated
by Maria Konash · 3 min read
Dubai Wants to Become the World’s First Blockchain-Powered Government by 2020
Photo: Mohammed Ali/Flickr

Dubai plans to utilize the Blockchain technology for all its transactions by year 2020 through the use of Dubai Blockchain Strategy.

Dubai is quickly achieving its goal of becoming the world’s first blockchain-powered government to utilize the technology for all transactions by 2020. Blockchain found overall support there last year, when the government announced its intention to relocate all of its procedures to a blockchain by the year 2020.

Ahmad Al Mulla, chairman of CIOMajlis (Chief Information Officer’s) session, speaking at the conference on ‘Blockchain Technology,’ recently held by CIOMajlis, said:

“Dubai is a frontrunner in adopting the latest technology and has set a goal to become the world’s first government to execute all implementable transactions on the blockchain by 2020. The government initiatives in this direction present tremendous business opportunities for the private sector in the UAE.”

It is known that HH Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammad bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai and chairman of the Dubai Executive Council, made public the concept of the Dubai Blockchain Strategy, the main aim of which is to explore and research technology innovations and thus provide the chance to deliver improvements to the nation.

According to Dan Frankel, Blockchain City Adviser to Dubai at ConsenSys, the distributed ledger technology may, among other things, remove costs of manual processing, including processing errors and re-work and deliver savings as much as 75 percent or over 5.5 billion annually towards streamlining document processing alone.

For the context, ConsenSys has been named as the official Blockchain Advisor for the City of Dubai and will be working in collaboration with government officials along with IBM, the project’s Lead Strategic Partner. IBM partnered with the government of Dubai in February this year in order to give a boost to blockchain technology usage aimed at improving import and re-export of goods.

To guarantee and facilitate the availability of highly-qualified specialists in blockchain technology, ConsenSys is planning to launch ConsenSys Academy, a highly selective online blockchain training programme that prepares expertised developers to enter this rapidly growing technology. The specialists, who graduated the progranne successfully, will be invited to Dubai to receive their certificates and offered jobs in the Dubai Blockchain initiative.

“There is a current global shortage of object oriented programmers and developers. We need to ensure sufficient availability of trained manpower and as these opportunities are accruing across all sectors, we will see a lot of blockchain implementation in [the] near future across government as well as private sectors.” – Frankel said.

Meanwhile, ArabianChain, a United Arab Emirates-based public blockchain startup, has received AED3m ($817,000) from a private investor to further develop its operations. ArabianChain, which was founded in February 2016, is an effort linked to a described Dubai initiative to secure all government documents on a blockchain by 2020, which is now developing a public blockchain platform to drive applications focusing on Islamic banking and government services.

Blockchain News, Editor's Choice, News
Related Articles