Why is the UK Court Starting Pilot Blockchain Evidence System?

Blockchain Is Surging Ahead In Technology Space

Hereafter blockchain continues to find new kinds of usage and adoptions with each passing day and it is true that while secure storage of any format of data has been tried and tested time and again on blockchain technology, where the United Kingdom’s Ministry of Justice is possibly the first government authority to pilot a blockchain-based project in a bid to secure digital pieces of evidence. 

DLT To Handle & Store The Evidence

Here the initiative was announced in a blog post by the Her Majesty’s Courts & Tribunals Service (HMCTS) portal by BalajiAnbil was the head of digital architecture and cybersecurity in the UK’s Ministry of Justice. Hence the pilot project is aiming to assess whether the distributed ledger technology (DLT) is utilized to simplify and streamline the present-day court processes with a focus on securely handling digital evidence. Hereby the working group constituted to lead the project has already conducted the inaugural meeting and is actively working with industry experts. 

The Order In The Court

It was found that citing the practical issues and challenges faced in managing evidence as the working group is looking for a system that is capable of maintaining the records of all those system activities that by now capture how the various forms of the digital evidences get created, thereby accessed or modified and by which entity or participant and from which location. The records are then needed to be maintained in chronological order in a way that can then easily enable the reconstruction and verification of the sequence of events and actions that can lead to and certify the current state of the digital evidence. In this context therefore it comes as a suitable DLT technology along with its intrinsic feature of maintaining what is a well-defined audit trail that fits the bill and it can be then the crucial platform that can guarantee all the integrity of evidence in its secure handling, storage and also retrieval. 

Subsequently, the project is actively following work done in similar domains where both in academia and in other regional implementations whereas researchers at the Britain’s University of Surrey they are attempting to secure those digital archives of the UK’s National Archives thereafter on a DLT system while Estonia has also built an innovative, as well as the blockchain-based solution for their citizen identity management. It is understood that thereby these projects will surely come to provide crucial pointers to develop what is the required model and a trial of all DLT solutions for their interagency evidence sharing that is planned for later. 

Here The Russian Bank Completes Bond Blockchain Transaction

We now have state-owned Russian banking and the financial services company called Sberbank which is headquartered in Moscow and as a telecom firm, the MTS is the leading Russian telecommunications operator with the digital service provider announcing that they are completing what is the country’s first commercial bond transaction using the blockchain. 

To Note The Russian Bank Executes Country's First Commercial Bond Transaction

Moving further on, there are those transactions which were carried out by Sberbank CIB as essentially the corporate and investment banking business of the Sberbank as the transaction was thereafter placed through what was a proprietary blockchain network system which thereby operated by the National Settlement Depository which is based on Hyperledger Fabric 1.1, that is a project under the Hyperledger umbrella.

The truth is that while MTS placed commercial bonds of 750 million rubles for sale and the primary buyer was Sberbank CIB as the bonds involved in the blockchain transaction have a maturity period of182 days with an annual coupon rate of 6.8 percent and the trade was privately placed on the OTC market.

Hence the transaction was processed through the standard delivery against payment settlement system working on the simultaneous transfer of the money from the buyer and securities from the seller using the blockchain system. To be frank it was found that as per the MTS release, the framework of the transactions was thereby structured to include the possibility of a more dynamic change in the compositions of the network participants to potentially open the whole issue to a wide range of the investors. 

Hereafter NSD comes in collaboration with various Russian banks and other entities as it has been working on the trials of its Hyperledger based commercial bond trading platform as the earlier phases of the testing of the blockchain-based transaction processing system has now involved Raiffeisenbank Russia purchasing $ 10 million worth of the bonds over a mobile phone network and the NSD announces plans to launch its cryptocurrency wallet 

The Concluding Thoughts 

It was found thereafter that according to EddiAstanin, the chairman of the board at NSD told the CoinDesk as there are pioneering transactions with Sberbank and MTS that confirmed that the blockchain’s status coming as an efficient industrial technology that is providing confidentiality and the speed during securities settlement. Then it was that Russian authorities and commercial entities have been experimenting with blockchain technology for long as there were reports about the nation working on a national cryptocurrency.

Then it partnered with another oil-producing nation, Venezuela earlier as it also tried interesting experiments in adopting blockchain technology.

To make sure then finally there is another global investment bank called HSBC that had declared earlier as it had successfully made it to be the world’s first of the global trade finance transaction using the blockchain technology indicating a global trend in embracing the technology.