India Blockchain Platform

Context:

• India has made a significant effort to become a digital society by building a large citizen-scale digital public infrastructure.
• As, With the commencement of the Digital India mission in 2015, our payments, provident fund, passports, driving licences, crossing tolls, and checking land records all have been transformed with modular applications built on Aadhaar, UPI, and the India Stack.
• The Government of India and Reserve Bank of India (RBI) have been promoting simplification and transparency to increase the speed of interaction between individuals, markets, and the government.

What are the Challenges of public digital infrastructure?

• For better implementation of digital technology, it is prerequisite that digital infrastructure should be designed based on principles of availability, affordability, value, and trust.
• Which can be made by using design principles, legislative frameworks, governance frameworks, and public engagement.
• But the current digital ecosystem, it is identified that existing different digital infrastructures are not interconnected as a design; a technical integration is required to make them conversant and interoperable.
• Most of available digital data is stored on private databases, which makes the validation of data more complex as the network grows, driving up costs and creating inefficiencies.

Web 3.0 to address these challenges: Yes

What is Web 3.0 (Web3)?

• Web 3.0 (Web3) is the third generation of the evolution of web technologies.
• The web, also known as the World Wide Web, is the foundational layer for how the internet is used, providing website and application services.
• Web 3.0 will have a strong emphasis on decentralized applications and make extensive use of blockchain-based technologies.
• Web 3.0 will also make use of machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI) to help empower more intelligent and adaptive applications.
• Web 3.0 architecture can be the next resilient platforms, which is capable of scaling and solving the current challenges in a cost-efficient manner.
• The Web 3.0 architecture establishes a new version of the Internet protocol incorporating token-based economics, transparency, and decentralization.
• A user can access all ecosystem benefits using a distributed token where they can show proof of ownership, tax history, and payment instrument.
• Therefore, A blockchain-based infrastructure can provide all these attributes without the need of trusting any actor to verify a ledger’s history. The blockchain records could be visible, compiled, and audited by the regulators in real time.

Increasing global adoption of blockchain infrastructure:

• Many countries have already begun establishing their blockchain policies and infrastructure.
• Estonia, the world’s blockchain capital, is using blockchain infrastructure to verify and process all e-governance services offered to the general public.
• In Britain, the Centre for Digital Built Britain, a partnership between the University of Cambridge and the UK government is running the National Digital Twin (NDT)program to foster collaboration between owners and developers of digital twins in the built environment
• There are also well-established Decentralised finance (DeFi) platforms that rely on blockchain infrastructure like Ethereum, however, pegged to the base cryptocurrencies owned by that platform.
• DeFi allows users to borrow and lend cryptocurrencies on a short-term basis at algorithmically determined rates.

The digital roads that India must build using blockchain

• The Indian digital community, including fintech’s, academia, think tanks, and institutions, should focus on
  • supporting research in standards,
  • interoperability, and
  • efficient handling of current known issues with the distributed technologies, scalability and performance, consensus mechanisms, and auto-detection of vulnerabilities
• Also, at present, end-user devices such as smartphones do not support blockchain-based technology and, as a result, the last mile is always outside the network.

Current regulation mechanism and what need to be done?

• Currently, the blockchain models are unregulated and rely on intrinsic standards.
• The ideal solution to solving most of the known issues of decentralised technologies lies in the middle path,e., a national platform.
  • blockchains (both permissioned and public),
  • application providers (decentralized applications — dApps —and existing),
  • token service providers, and infrastructure managers.
• As a result, together they can form a reliable and efficient network for the Indian digital economy.

The need of the hour is to work on an indigenous solution of the people, for the people, and by the people. A digital infrastructure based on blockchain technology will transform the digital ecosystem in India, and will enable the future of digital services, platforms, applications, content, and solutions. Considering the current situation worldwide, one can safely assume that we are at the beginning of the curve, but the days are not far.

Source: Indian Express

Previous Year Question

Q.1) With reference to Web 3.0, consider the following statements: (2022)

1. Web 3.0 technology enables people to control their own data.
2. In Web 3.0 world, there can be blockchain based social networks.
3. Web 3.0 is operated by users collectively rather than a corporation

Which of the following given above are correct?

1. 1 and 2 only
2. 2 and 3 only
3. 1 and 3 only
4. 1, 2 and 3

Q.2) With reference to “Blockchain Technology”, consider the following statements: (2020)

1. It is a public ledger that everyone can inspect, but which no single user controls.
2. The structure and design of blockchain is such that all the data in it are about cryptocurrency only.
3. Applications that depend on basic features of blockchain can be developed without anybody’s permission.

Which of the statements given above is/are correct?

1. 1 only
2. 1 and 2 only
3. 2 only
4. 1 and 3 only