A South Korean provincial government recently tapped technology developed by blockchain startup Blocko for a vote on community funding.

The province of Gyeonggi-do – South Korea’s most populous – utilized Blocko’s Coinstack platform to vote on community aid projects as part of the Ddabok program. Through that program, local residents can propose ideas for aid, after which the provincial government can opt to award budgets to fund those projects.

Yet in the past, that process has largely been conducted behind closed doors by officials in Gyeonggi-do, as the scale of holding a vote using traditional means has proved to be an onerous one.

But in partnering with Blocko, Gyeonggi-do officials held a vote earlier this month as part of an effort to seek alternative methods for approving projects Residents submitted 9,000 votes, in both online and offline settings, resulting in the selection of more than 500 community aid projects.

As Blocko CEO Won Beom Kim explained:

“We used blockchain and Lua based smart-contracts on our blockchain platform (and) Coinstack to create a dynamic voting process to solve this problem. In this process, offline voters, online voters, and professional representatives all contributed to a fair and deterministic result which resulted in the selection of 527 community projects.”

In statements, officials from the provincial government celebrated the tech’s use for the community vote and indicated that blockchain could be leveraged as part of votes in the future.

“We can complement the limits of representative democracy with some direct democracy systems by using blockchains, the technology of the Fourth Industrial Revolution,” said Nam Kyung-pil, Gyeonggi-do’s governor.

The community vote isn’t the first time that authorities in South Korea have tapped Blocko’s tech.

The Korea Exchange (KRX), South Korea’s sole security exchange operator, hired Blocko to develop a smart contract for authenticating and verifying documents by cross-referencing current bank databases in the country. That private service was first launched last November.

Image courtesy of Blocko