UNICC’s Chief Technology Officer Presents at Hyperledger Global Forum

4 October, 2022

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Photo: UNICC

Hyperledger-UNICC partnership solidifies blockchain solutions for the UN family

UNICC continues to leverage an excellent partnership with Hyperledger for blockchain solutions for its Clients and Partner Organizations. Shashank Rai, Chief Technology Officer at UNICC, once again attended the Hyperledger Global Forum, this year in Dublin, Ireland. Shashank delivered a talk called ‘Blockchain, Biometrics and Geo-location: Lessons Learned from UNJSPF Innovative Technologies’ on 13 September.

Hyperledger is a not-for-profit entity, which has been created in particular to foster different blockchain solutions. It was formed by Linux Foundation so that all the different tech companies could collaborate on the development process of the Linux operating system. Due to the big success of this model, it has been replicated in a different number of other foundations.

Shashank, Rai, UNICC Chief Technology Officer

Hyperledger forum session: lessons learned from the Digital CE rollout

The context of the talk was the UNJSPF-UNICC project begun in January 2021, in accordance with the Pension Fund’s digital transformation strategy, to deploy a Digital Certificate of Entitlement solution, based on blockchain, biometrics and smart phone technologies, to transform their legacy pension certification and distribution process with their global reach of 80K beneficiaries located in more than 195 countries.

UNJSPF beneficiaries are required to sign and submit a Certificate of Entitlement every year as a ‘proof of existence’ and “proof of country of residence,’ to continue receiving their benefits. The UNJSPF Digital CE solution aims to create, verify, and secure the digital identities of beneficiaries – while also preventing fraud – using biometrics; identifying their locations with geo-location technology; and storing transactions on an immutable, traceable and independently auditable ledger, using the Hyperledger Indy blockchain platform.

Shashank emphasized the lessons learned after the first year of implementation of the Digital CE solution, addressing both technical and process related aspects of the deployment. This solution was selected as a finalist of two prestigious awards: The 2021 UN-Secretary-General’s award for innovation and sustainability; and the 2020 Gartner’s Eye on Innovation Awards for Government.

Other UNICC-Hyperledger collaboration opportunities

Public sectors entities such as the government of British Columbia (Canada) and U.S. state of Rhode Island are in various stages of implementing decentralized identities for their respective jurisdictions. UNICC has identified various areas of collaboration and exchange of ideas/experiences with these bodies.

About Hyperledger

Hyperledger is an open global ecosystem for enterprise grade blockchain technologies. It was created with the aim of accelerating industry-wide collaboration for developing high-performance and reliable blockchain and distributed ledger-based technology framework.

Any business can apply various modular blockchain solutions and services to significantly improve the performance of its operations and the efficiency of its business processes.

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