Islamabad: Blockchain technology has come under spotlight in Pakistan, WealthPK reported on Sunday.
In this era of Fourth Industrial Revolution, new technologies are revolutionizing each sector of economy.
Blockchain is one such technology that has come under the spotlight after the invention of bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009.
Generally, people consider blockchain as part of bitcoins, but these two are different. In reality, bitcoins were established using the blockchain technology just like email is an invention based on the internet.
Blockchain technology is a decentralized database with consensus, super security, and provenance trust characteristics. In more appropriate words, blockchain is an open and split ledger that works very effectively with the peer-to-peer network between two parties.
When a block is written in the blockchain ledger, it is almost impossible to make any modifications, WealthPK reported.
The use of blockchain technology is not limited to the creation of cryptocurrencies but rather it provides a base of invention to all other sectors of economy.
The world is witnessing a rapid adoption of blockchain-based solutions in a growing landscape of applications that routinely require trust, security, privacy, scale, and censorship circumvention.
Among the most important applications are value-added e-agriculture, digital delivery of public services, sharing information between government and private organizations, and disaster and humanitarian crisis management.
Blockchain tech is also gaining rapid traction in Pakistan, opening up new doors of opportunities and accelerating employment generation.
The Ministry of Science and Technology recently organized Pakistan’s first Blockchain Summit 2022 in Islamabad. Addressing the summit, Federal Minister for Science and Technology Senator Shibli Faraz said Pakistan could not separate itself from the affairs of the region adding that around 200 countries had somehow incorporated blockchain into their systems.
He said blockchain was a new emerging market of worth USD4.9 billion and was estimated to be worth USD20 billion by 2024, WealthPK reported.
Blockchain technology can improve transparency in the financial sector by exposing inefficiencies like fraud, leading to problem-solving that could reduce the risk for financial institutions.
According to estimates, by using this technology, the Pakistani banking sector can save 10 billion rupees annually. Blockchain has a robust security system that can make payments and money transfers faster and more traceable than the traditional banking.
Owing to data inefficiency, Pakistan’s agriculture sector is far behind the advanced countries. In the agriculture sector, use of blockchain technology can help devise a proper crop and food production system, food supply chain, control weather crisis, and manage agricultural finance.
Pakistan has no proper track and trace system of crops and food supply chain that leads to different crises like the wheat and sugar crisis, etc. Blockchain technology can help the government keep a proper record of crops and food production.
It can find the areas with excess food and those facing shortage. Owing to climate change, Pakistan has lost 14.7 percent of wheat and 20.5 percent of rice production in the last few years.
Through blockchain technology, Pakistan can mitigate weather effects and save its production from wastage.
The global ecommerce market is a 4.8 trillion-dollar market. Pakistan’s ecommerce sector is emerging, but the current [ecommerce] system confronts the problems of high cost due to middleman involvement, lack of trust in the ecommerce sellers, inadequate security of customers’ data, and time-consuming, WealthPK reported.
Blockchain technology can revolutionize the ecommerce market by reducing costs by eliminating the role of middlemen and providing a secure network for transaction of customers’ data and money from unwanted cyber-attacks. It allows customer
