The National Research Council (NRC) of Canada, primary national research and technology organization of country's government, has announced that it is hosting its own Ethereum blockchain explorer application. The move is aimed at better business and transparent administration of government contracts.
Through its Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), the NRC is using Bitaccess’ latest product, the Catena Blockchain Suite to host its own blockchain explorer on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). IPFS functions as a peer-to-peer (P2P) method of storing and sharing data in a distributed manner. Unlike regular web pages, web applications hosted on IPFS are unalterable and can be accessed far into the future, even if the original web host has gone offline.
Through Catena, NRC IRAP is conducting a live trial to explore the use of public blockchains in the transparent administration of government grants and contributions. The explorer application is similar to a search engine, which allows users to instantly search the Ethereum blockchain for proactively published grants and contribution data.
Moe Adham, co-founder of Bitaccess said:
“Our goal is to enable institutions to become fully transparent, and enable constituents to participate in the verification and validation of public information. We built the Catena Blockchain Suite as a simple, low risk, application for institutions to get introduced to blockchain technology. So far the reception has been terrific”.
In January 2018, NRC IRAP had successfully launched the Government of Canada's first-ever live trial of public blockchain technology (on Ethereum) for the transparent administration of government contracts. The program began proactively publishing information on new and amended Contribution Agreements with firms in real time. The NRC stated:
"These are early days, but NRC IRAP's experiments with blockchain are expected to provide constructive insight into the potential for this technology and how it may be used for more open and transparent operations for public programs."