Australian government published the national blockchain roadmap

The Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources of the government of Australia published the national blokchain roadmap. The document aims to set the national strategy regarding blockchain technology. Roadmap outlines the future step in a compact five-year plan.  

Citing the Gartner’s predictions that the blockchain industry will pass the US $30 billion mark in 2030, Australia wants to take the active role in attracting industry and research on this technology. Roadmap is proposing establishing of the working groups for analyzing blokchain use cases, particularly in the area of agriculture, education and finance. It also looks at the stronger international cooperation looking at the examples of countries using blockchain to provide efficient government services. Australia is hoping to leverage existing bilateral agreements in order to run pilot projects with other governments. Roadmap also recognizes the importance of education in this area underlying the joint work with academic institutions and help in developing common framework and course content for blockchain qualifications.   

Australia will stay committed to developing global blockchain standards to preserve interoperability across systems. Australia’s government is working through Standards Australia (non-government standards development body) and ISO technical committee ISO/TC 307 (Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies) to establish such standards, recognizing that ‘standards for blockchain will improve market confidence and support broader rollout of blockchain systems.’

More than 40% of all blockchain business located in Australia are related to the financial and insurance services. Government is currently piloting a couple of interesting projects based on blockchain technology such as: ‘Smart IP rights’ by IP Australia, which are digital representation of intellectual property that can be used online in preventing the misuse and counterfeiting, and also Inter-Government Ledger (IGL) used by the Australian Border Force (ABF) to share electronic documents between governments.