#distributed ledger technologies

Ripple, Circle, JP Morgan all Using DLT Technology for Cross Border Payments: World Bank

Distributed ledger technologies currently possess all the necessary features that can ease the pains of cross border remittance industry which have made it a topic of discussion for institutions across the globe whether are these the future. A recent blog post released by World Bank also discussed the same naming how Ripple Circle and JP Morgan are bringing DLT to use in cross border payments.

Welcome to 2017

Mrs. Ms. Dr. Madame. Professor. Sir. Even Esq. In any one week, my identity shifts and moves between a range of titles, names, hyphen- and hyphen-less states and even genders. I can’t fit my name on my Medicare card, and my tax return suggests that I have a rich life of alter egos. I am filed under H, W, and even M, and I was once asked to bring my husband in to the motor registry to support my claim to have my full name on my licence. Hotel wifi appears to hate me and will not revisit the judgement anytime soon.

My resolution for 2017 is to encourage those of us in elearning and administration leadership positions to focus on providing better solutions for digital identification and authentication. Very little of my identity jumble is my choice, but I can live with it. The stakes are far higher—as many other people have noted—when data mismatches drive decisions about welfare recipients. But I also think that not tackling this fundamental issue with persistent attention and perseverance is holding back the global provision of education, as well as better forms of administration and consumer services such as banking.

The pervasiveness and depth of our digital identity problems means that they are an everyday irritation of university life. You, like me, have probably had to fill out coloured layers of forms with the same information repeatedly, and been disappointed when moving forms online means a higher volume of repetitive action emails that still ask you to authenticate your identity over and over again.

Things are hardly better for students. The signature of a notary or justice of the peace is sought to attest that a photocopy of a testamur looks like its original, even thought they might never have seen an original of that kind before. Invigilators check signatures and identity cards against those seeking admission to an exam. People talk proudly about asking students taking online exams to move their computer camera in a circle to check that they are not being aided, and somewhere, out there—where labour is cheap no doubt—an army of people watch recordings of students taking online exams to check that nothing untoward has happened.

It does not have to be this way. Last year, I wrote on the potential of distributed ledger technology (DLT) ‘blockchain’ for reshaping the way that we manage credit transfer. DLT enables an agreed, up to date and protected collection of data across multiple locations such as campuses or countries. I could not be more pleased that universities like MIT are testing the proposition at the same time that edX has activated a twelve-university credit exchange consortium.

But these efforts lag far behind those of the fintech sector, where we are not only seeing a growth in different cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin—which I have written on before—Antshares, Gridcoin and Ripple, but also what are called ‘smart contracts’. Smart contracts support, verify and protect an agreement via computer protocols, rather than just via written legal contracts overseen by human vigilance.

Fintech is moving fast, pushing and testing the boundaries of what works. Consequently, the efficacy of this sector’s innovations is constantly being improved and challenged, as the large-scale hacking of The Dao investment fund attests. Regional and Central banking authorities have noticed, and are working to accelerate and regulate their use. Recent examples include reports by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, the UK Office for Science, the European Central Bank, and the US Federal Reserve.

Somewhat unsurprisingly, the World Economic Forum sees all of this as a commercial opportunity for banks to secure new business in identity and authentication management. A valid question to ask is whether a for profit sector that reflects the experience and voice of a predominantly male, wealthy, adult workforce and client base should be the only one that should be driving the global discussion on identity and authentication across distributed digital systems.

What if a predominately not for profit sector that has a longer and wider association with people across the globe had something more to say about this? Imagine the world taking an informatics turn for a firmer social good. Start with the need for schooling systems to identify and authenticate students minus documents, and think about its application first in contexts where young people are displaced or live far away from government or commercial infrastructure but who have access to a family mobile phone. Think next of our need, intimated in the DSD and Sony projects, to keep a digital record of learning that can be taken across borders and be used to support applications for employment and further learning. Think of ways of verifying that a person who takes an exam, test or assessment task online is who they say they are, or that credit recognition can do without the slow generation of bespoke written legal contracts. Or simply a form that does not ask your full name again.

This is not simply a call for girls to do more coding—like me, they will probably want to know why they should do such a thing—but for us to apply the collective expertise we have in economics, computer science and cryptography, for instance, to our sector as well as to fintech and I hope also to health sciences. We have the disciplinary expertise, but we also need to ensure that women, and both adults and young people from different cultural backgrounds have a say in how their identity is defined and managed.