Local Government in South Korea Taps Blockchain for Community Vote

A South Korean provincial authorities not too long ago tapped expertise developed by blockchain startup Blocko for a vote on group funding.

The province of Gyeonggi-do – South Korea’s most populous – utilized Blocko’s Coinstack platform to vote on group help initiatives as a part of the Ddabok program. Through that program, native residents can suggest concepts for help, after which the provincial authorities can decide to award budgets to fund these initiatives.

Yet in the previous, that course of has largely been carried out behind closed doorways by officers in Gyeonggi-do, as the dimensions of holding a vote utilizing conventional means has proved to be an onerous one.

But in partnering with Blocko, Gyeonggi-do officers held a vote earlier this month as a part of an effort to hunt various strategies for approving initiatives Residents submitted 9,000 votes, in each on-line and offline settings, ensuing in the choice of greater than 500 group help initiatives.

As Blocko CEO Won Beom Kim defined:

“We used blockchain and Lua based smart-contracts on our blockchain platform (and) Coinstack to create a dynamic voting process to solve this problem. In this process, offline voters, online voters, and professional representatives all contributed to a fair and deterministic result which resulted in the selection of 527 community projects.”

In statements, officers from the provincial authorities celebrated the tech’s use for the group vote and indicated that blockchain could possibly be leveraged as a part of votes in the longer term.

“We can complement the limits of representative democracy with some direct democracy systems by using blockchains, the technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” stated Nam Kyung-pil, Gyeonggi-do’s governor.

The group vote is not the primary time that authorities in South Korea have tapped Blocko’s tech.

The Korea Exchange (KRX), South Korea’s sole safety change operator, employed Blocko to develop a sensible contract for authenticating and verifying paperwork by cross-referencing present financial institution databases in the nation. That non-public service was first launched final November.

Image courtesy of Blocko