The National Research Council of Canada (NRC), through its Industrial Research Assistance Program (IRAP), unveiled it’s plan to test blockchain technology for managing funding with Canadian small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

Connecting Government to small and medium-sized enterprises

In its efforts to strengthen these ties, NRC IRAP will be hosting its brand-new blockchain explorer application, deployed on the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) and developed by Bitaccess, according to a recently published feature story. IPFS has a peer-to-peer functionality as it stores and shares data in a distributed manner.

Web applications which are deployed on IPFS are unalterable, unlike conventional webpages, and can be accessed even when the original web hosting service has gone offline improving the overall reliability of the service. Data accessibility and immutability is ensured by switching to IPFS as applications are hosted by several different computers.

Blockchain Adoption

Since June 2017, NRC has been striving to promote the usage of blockchain technology in the Canadian public sector. The NRC arranged a session, attended by Canadian Government officials, to pitch the benefits of using blockchain technology for better administration of its contracts with SMEs. At this meeting, NRC IRAP also disclosed its plans to test the effectiveness of blockchain technology in handling its Program’s Contribution Agreements with Canadian SMEs.

There are several plus points of performing this blockchain experiment as it will bring together several different market players with added advantages of transparency and increased public disclosure.

This isn’t the first time the NRC has successfully deployed blockchain technology. In January 2018 the NRC IRAP launched a trial to explore blockchain tech to make government research grant and funding information more transparent to the public.