By Bitange Ndemo
Since 2018 when the World Economic Forum declared that blockchain would be among other technologies defining the emerging revolution, there has been a lot of skepticism around what it can do that cannot be done with existing systems.
Academics argued that there isn’t a problem that blockchain is solving. In particular, Stefaan Verhulst, co-founder of the Governance Laboratory (GovLab) at New York University said recently that some of the technology’s challenges are a “lack of governance and ethical frameworks that can help scale the use of blockchain” and that it is “still being promoted as a solution in search of a problem.”
To the contrary, blockchain’s safety, transparency and immutability have never been questioned. There is always a problem when these three attributes are missing especially in transferring or exchanging anything of value, ranging from assets to payments and even data transfer.
What has not happened is the articulation of policy and regulatory frameworks that will guide further development of the technology.
This is perhaps what has triggered a series of high-level policy engagements across the world to chart the way forward.
Last week, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) hosted a Global Blockchain Policy Forum in Paris to deliberate its development. Specifically, the forum sought to assess the development of blockchain in the past 12 months and delve into some of the specific challenges to implementation and adoption, discuss the emerging policy responses, and share the best practices, and investigate uses of blockchain in specific policy areas, highlighting the work that the OECD and other stakeholders are doing…Read more>>
