Location: Churchill Room, 100 Parliament Street, Westminster, London, SW1A 2NH, UK. 6pm to 8pm 27th February 2018

The Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport arranged a two hour session yesterday evening in the heart of Westminster, attended by more than one hundred civil-servants, academics and technology start-ups, to present and discuss examples of how distributed ledger technology (DLT) could be used to aid positive digital transformation across a number of aspects of public sector and business life.

The first presenter was Steve Schneider of the Secure Systems Research Group, University of Surrey presented the VOLT project (www.volt-project.org ) , which is researching methods to enable citizens to make voting choices using blockchain technology. Some probing questions from the floor questioned how a voting-right and the identity of the person could be certain in a decentralised system. This would require an identifier, such as a unique personal number and potentially coupled with another project called TAPESTRY, which trails individual digital breadcrumbs in order to identify a person as opposed to an online bot. Much more to come on this initiative, which has support from the UK Government Home Office.

Then Dr Aron Fischer described the fascinating Colony initiative (www.colony.io/whitepaper ) of enabling organisational self-governance using smart-contracts, developed on the Ethereum network. At the core of the Colony project is the principle that individuals undertake tasks associated with a token-based reward. By successfully completing these tasks, the individuals earn such tokens and augment reputation, which will over-time increases their influence in their organisation and the overall network. Explicit voting for or against a task being completed with sufficient quality is a last resort option, with the strength of reputation and influence being the more important methods for distinguishing positive status and the options for momentum and natural shift across the network. The colony protocol emphasises a meritocratic behaviour across the network, allowing for organisational hierarchy to be dynamic and purely based on contribution quality and significance. Much more to come, with the further development of swarm and whisper protocols to aid accounting and smart-contract reinforcement, to strengthen the adoption blockchain.

Alan Vey and Annika Monari then presented the Aventus Foundation Protocol, which is also being developed on the Ethereum network, with the objective of offering a secure and transparent open-source standard for ticket exchange that developers may use to create new solutions for the Ticketing industry. The ticketing supply-chain has been bedevilled by touting, counterfeits, unsold inventory and lack of oversight, all of which leads to loss of revenues and margins for artists, promoters and other sector participants, nefarious business behaviour, and a damaged customer experience. The advent of the Aventus protocol is to develop and stimulate three layers of a new blockchain-based ticketing industry, which may be adopted by software-developers across promoters, venues, and primary / secondary ticketing agents. The first layer is the core Aventus Protocol, the first version of which will be released in late March / early April 2018, the second Service-layer is a set of Enterprise-ready API connectivity and operational tools, and the third Application-layer accesses the protocol or provides UI wrappers. Lots more to come with the release of the protocol in a month or so.

It was positive to see such keen engagement at the DCMS from the delegates concerning the opportunities presented and the stimuli to use DLT through blockchain as a positive next wave of digital internet innovation to drive adoption across various vertical sectors. 2018 is the start of a six year growth phase for blockchain across a number of industries according to Accenture. Better to get in early and affect growth in your business directly.