Canadian Government Debuts Ethereum Blockchain Explorer 🚨 This article is 6 years old...
Canadian Government Debuts Ethereum Blockchain Explorer
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Updated: Nov. 7, 2019 at 2:44 am UTC
Photo by MURUCUTU on Unsplash
Canada’s National Research Council has launched a new Ethereum blockchain explorer for public use, according to a press release.
Canada’s Move Toward Transparency
The development is one of the world’s first instances of a country building an explorer platform, and the new blockchain explorer will be used to provide the public transparency to government frameworks, specific to grants and contributions. The platform was developed by the NRC’s Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), coded by blockchain firm Bitaccess and is hosted on cloud-based Interplanetary File System (IPFS).
Industry observers have termed the IPFS as an “immutable, distributed supplement” to the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP)–the globally used internet network. The former is said to enable a more secure, transparent and less centralized internet than the latter.
NRC further explains that IPFS fundamentally operates as a peer-to-peer method of data transfer and storage, with the capacity to host web applications protected by robust immutability.
Related to the development, Bitaccess published a statement explaining how to utilize the blockchain explorer efficiently to swiftly locate datasets–grants and contributions–embedded by the government on the Ethereum blockchain.
Blockchain Experiments Proving Technology’s Prowess
Moe Adham, co-founder of Bitaccess, highlighted that the framework enables institutions to become wholly-transparent while empowering participants to verify and validate all public information.
Adham added:
“We built the [IPFS] as a simple, low risk, application for institutions to get introduced to blockchain technology.”
In January 2018, the Canadian government had its first brush with blockchain technology when it launched a public blockchain prototype to administer government contracts.
At the time, the development was more experimental, with the NRC working on several use cases, alongside the newly-released framework, to provide quantifiable, sharable information with the public using a blockchain network.
Meanwhile, the NRC concluded its ambitious announcement by noting that its experiments are “expected to provide constructive insights” with regard to the future of blockchain while creating a more transparent ecosystem for citizens.
