The COVID-19 pandemic has changed many lives, but many industries are clearly prepared to act to find proactive solutions. The blockchain industry seems to be one of the most prepared, having created its own infrastructure over the last 10 years. Decentralized technology is fueling an economy that helps poor people in rural and developing areas, or in areas affected by an economic downturn. The same technology can be used to combat fake news, and may offer as an effective contact tracing system that guarantees privacy and transparency for all parties involved.
Bottom-up resilience
No one should be left alone and unsupported. Cryptocurrencies can ensure just that: they can create value where traditional money misses the mark. Various projects already exist to help fuel economies disrupted by the downturn caused by the health emergency.
SocialPay by Scrypta
Vizzini is a small town near Catania, in Sicily. As with all towns in Italy, Vizzini’s administration has been given government grants to help people on low incomes who are experiencing a lowered or cancelled stipend to buy food and groceries. Italy is famous for its high degree of bureaucracy and the complexity of its administration systems, so the Scrypta Foundation stepped in to help.
The Scrypta Foundation was created with “the aim of supporting and coordinating a dense network of collaborations between developers, companies, professionals, public administrations and users at a global level, all united by a single purpose: a technological revolution through Scrypta Blockchain”. An all-Italian team, the Scrypta Foundation is developing Scrypta Blockchain, a “decentralized and permissionlessdigital infrastructure developed for the creation of complete architectures at the service of unlimited projects and use cases”. During the pandemic, Scrypta Foundation developed SocialPay, an open-source project based on the Scrypta Planum sidechain management system. The administration of Vizzini now uses this system as a platform to distribute food and groceries coupons to the population.
The critical factor here is that any town could potentially implement the same platform on their own. The process is fairly simple:
- Create a new Scrypta account on web.manent.app. This will be the account holder of the sidechain;
- Send an email to info@scrypta.foundation requesting LYRA tokens. These are necessary to start the sidechain (1.001 a least) and to enable accounts for people who will redeem the coupons (0.1 per person)
- Go to planum.dev and create a new sidechain, filling in at least the following attributes:
- Name
- Ticker (symbol of the token)
- Supply
- Reissuable: true
- Burnable: true
- Once the sidechain has been created, the unique sidechain address will be displayed. That can also be viewed by accessing the block explorer (having previously logged in).
This is a good example of how a blockchain can be simplified and made accessible to technicians who don’t necessarily know how to program a new token. Every town has its own sidechain, and can manage a finite but variable supply of virtual money that can be exchanged between users and merchants. Alongside the Admin software needed to manage the sidechain, a project to enable a POS-style interface is available, as is another that generates virtual wallet ‘cards’ for users. This is a one-stop solution that can help towns act faster in delivering a good service to their inhabitants.
Combating fake news
The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly caused an overflow of information, both due to the volume of news about the pandemic and the flood of content being created for everyone to watch, read, and listen to as people have more time on their hands.
As the amount of information on everyone’s feed rises, it’s ever more difficult to know which news to trust.
ANSACheck
The news from ANSA.it, a leading italian newswire, was constantly mistaken for news items from websites that imitated the graphics of ANSA.it, but were in fact spreading false information. CoinDesk quotes Stefano De Alessandri, CEO and Managing Director of ANSA.it: “We had people calling us to say, ‘Why have you published this? Is this true? Are you sure?’”. A solution was already being developed, in partnership with consultancy firm EY; that solution is ANSACheck, a news certification system powered by the ethereum blockchain. According to the official announcement on ANSA.it, the system works in three different moments:
- When a news item is created on the ANSA website, a unique identifier is associated with it on the blockchain;
- When the news item is edited or updated on the ANSA website, a new transaction on the blockchain is created, linked to the respective identifier;
- When the news is relayed on a publisher’s website (ANSA provides news to more than 80 publishers), a new record associated with the identifier of that news is created, actually developing a history of the news.
This is an example of a news item certified on the blockchain:
{
"id": "2f3c3eb2ef9b86127bf5272ff6ac8c50",
"title": "Sicilia: esame Finanziaria all'Ars riprende domani",
"content_hash": "813f48731d6e4a34098da69bd19c9f9b",
"event": "publication",
"timestamp": "2020-05-01T21:31:10.000Z"
}Code language: JSON / JSON with Comments (json)The id is the unique identifier cited above; the title is the title of the news item; the content_hash is uniquely generated from the news content, whilst the event is the type of trigger that created the transaction (published, updated/edited or relayed by a publisher). The timestamp unsurprisingly provides data about the date and time of the transaction.
ANSACheck may (hopefully) be only the first tool created to limit the spread of disinformation. It’s currently only applied to news provided by ANSA – about 3.000 items daily – but it’s a good start in terms of exploring the benefits of distributing news via a decentralized and transparent platform.
A contact tracing platform?
There are many discussions around the usage, control, development, and distribution of apps provided by national governments that can enable automatic contact tracing to minimize the risk of exponential COVID-19 infections.
Very different approaches to contact tracing have been seen from countries around the world: in China, it’s mandatory to install an app that displays your current level of exposure to COVID-19 contagion using a color-coded QR code from green (no exposure) to red (almost certainly exposed). This is a fairly invasive system, but offers more comprehensive coverage than the situation seen in Singapore, where only 12.5% of the population installed a bluetooth-based app on their smartphone, limiting the effectiveness of the system hugely. A more complex, yet user-friendly system could be put in place, using current systems and leveraging the decentralization, transparency, and anonymity offered by the blockchain.
IdealCOVIDApp
Let’s imagine an app that uses blockchain to help with contact tracing. This app should meet the following requirements in order to be adoped on a massive scale:
- Multilingual, to be installed all over the world
- Privacy focused, using the Exposure Notification Framework API provided by Apple and Google
- Transparent, using a decentralized ledger technology
The first requirement is pretty simple to achieve. The complexity lies in integrating the Exposure Notification Framework API (ENF) and the blockchain. Currently, the ENF works by creating a set of unique identifiers per device that are visible to the network for a specified amount of time. If a user gets sick with COVID-19, they need to give consent to the app to propagate this data in before all other users in the network can be alerted if they’ve been in close proximity to the infected person. This is how Bending Spoon’s new ‘Immuni’ app would work in Italy when it’s released (hopefully by the end of May). However, this system has several flaws: it lacks incentives for users to both download the app and give consent for the results to be propagated in case of a positive virus diagnosis. Blockchain could solve both of these problems.
The first problem can be solved by creating incentives for people to download the app; namely, by creating a token economy inside the app. Users who download the app, keep their contact with other people to a minimum, and give consent for data propagation if diagnosed positive can earn tokens that can be redeemed in a government-approved marketplace of goods and services. Users learn that you can earn money if you are careful – even if you are not, you can still earn tokens if you help to propagate the data.
Secondly, every contact between two people can be recorded on the blockchain in a way that is available for everyone to see, but does not identify the participants. This technological aspect incentivizes a change in behaviour: if I don’t want to install the app because I feel I’m the only one doing so, or that I don’t want to be the first to try it, when all the transactions associated with all contact events are visible, I am reassured that I’m not alone and that, as I can’t tell which person is associated with a specific address, neither will other people be able to see who I am by looking at the address on the blockchain explorer.
These are just two ideas that may help to clarify how blockchain can help power a decentralized data economy. Furthermore, any contact tracing system is highly complex, and simply using blockchain would not solve every problems, of course. Nonetheless, by systematically solving one issue at a time, a more comprehensive solution can hopefully be found.