BALANGA CITY — The two-day annual global summit of Blockchain, the first such summit in the Philippines, started Wednesday in the giant Bataan People’s Center at the Capitol compound here where the country’s top blockchain experts shared their views and experiences.
The summit was in partnership with the Department of Information and Communications Technology with the support of the provincial government of Bataan, Balanga City mayor’s office and the Authority of the Freeport Area of Bataan.
Gov. Jose Enrique Garcia III, 3rd District Rep. Maria Angela Garcia, and AFAB administrator Emmanuel Pineda thanked Blockchain and DICT for choosing Bataan as the venue for the event.
“Experts in the field of technology, particularly in the Blockchain industry, came to share their knowledge and experience in the use of modern economy or digital economy,” the governor said.
Brendan Lee, founder of Elas Digital, explained that Blockchain is a global public ledger that is big enough, scalable to capture all the financial activities, work activities happening in the world all at the same time and put together as one ledger.
“For me, it is the founding idea of Blockchain on how to do in a way that is fast, cheap and immutable so that anybody who is using that ledger can show the evidence of their activities for a long time into the future,” Lee said.
He noted “tremendous opportunity in the Philippines and really Blockchain is here to help to re-imagine government services that rely heavily on paper and administrative processes.”
“What we want to be able to do is to replace that paper with a Blockchain recording media and really speed up the delivery of those services and make them much more efficient,” he said.
“For government agencies in the Philippines and basically in the Bataan area, what we really want to understand is where are they having the most trouble dealing with the paper system that are existing today and then looking at how we can take that paper system migrated into the Blockchain so that they can have much less friction, much less time lost finding pieces of paper and writing on pieces of paper and capture everything digitally so that they can optimize these services,” Lee furthered.
He said that the migration of government services into the Blockchain is really a catalyst for strong public-private-partnerships in infrastructure and in the service delivery.
“I think Bataan is our leader in the Philippines to becoming a Blockchain city and in a way we really came into word with motivated government agency who want to take their services forward into this next digital age and really provide people who may really be accountable with the oversight and visibility of their activities and really reduce corruption and make the system work much more smoothly,” Lee concluded.
