Experiment With Pension Funds Proves Blockchain as ‘Ultimate’ Identity Tech

The United Nations leaned into blockchain know-how to overtake its personal pension system, and a examine of that course of concluded the innovation is the “ultimate technology for digital identity verification,” which has spurred the UN towards extending the system and sharing it with different worldwide teams.

The UN — which has explored numerous blockchain makes use of through the years — tried it out on their United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (UNJSPF), in keeping with a white paper launched this week that recommended its use in confirming folks’s identities may also help in safety, effectivity and transparency. In cooperation with the Hyperledger Foundation, the UN sought to “improve and secure the UN pension process globally by putting a blockchain-supported digital identification infrastructure into production.”

The UN pension fund had been working off of a 70-year-old system to determine beneficiaries in 190 international locations, counting on a paper-based method to show greater than 70,000 beneficiaries had been who they mentioned they had been, nonetheless alive and the place they claimed to be. It was vulnerable to error and abuse, and resulted in about 1,400 cost suspensions yearly, in keeping with the doc. So the group shifted to the blockchain-powered digital certification, starting with a 2020 pilot program and a 2021 implementation.

“The shift away from physical documentation has substantially reduced processing times previously spent on receiving, opening, scanning, and archiving paper documents,” the paper mentioned.

The blockchain helped remove the single-point-of-failure downside posed by a centrally managed method, in keeping with the paper that detailed the method and outcomes, with the authors suggesting its success might be repeated elsewhere. Its open entry and usefulness by a number of entities reduces the repetitious want for id checks, the authors discovered.

The UN is exploring spreading related know-how all through its personal system and sharing it elsewhere as a “digital public good,” in search of to increase the Digital Certificate of Entitlement method to different worldwide organizations.

“The project has provided not only a technical prototype but also an operational model for how organizations across the UN family can collaborate to design secure, scalable, and inclusive digital public infrastructure,” wrote Sameer Chauhan, the director of the United Nations International Computing Centre, in a conclusion included within the paper.