“Private sector enterprises, which stand to gain due to potential synergies with the government, are also gearing up and early adopters and first to market with this technology will have definite first mover advantages,” Dan Frankel, Blockchain City Adviser to Dubai, ConsenSys, told Chief Information Officers (CIOs) at the recently held CIOMajlis session on ‘Blockchain Technology’. CIOMajlis is focused on bringing CIOs from both the public and private sectors in the UAE onto a common platform in order to share best practices and explore business solutions. The UAE’s Innovation Strategy and the government have established a goal to make it the world’s most innovative country by 2021.
Ahmad Al Mulla, Chairman of CIOMajlis, said:
Dubai is a frontrunner in adopting the latest technology and has set a goal to become the world’s first government to execute all implementable transactions on the blockchain by 2020. The government initiatives in this direction present tremendous business opportunities for the private sector in the UAE. There is a current global shortage of object oriented programmers and developers. We need to ensure sufficient availability of trained manpower and as these opportunities are accruing across all sectors, we will see a lot of blockchain implementation in near future across government as well as private sectors.
Adoption of Blockchain is estimated to result in over Dh5.5 billion savings annually towards streamlining document processing alone.
ConsenSys will be working in collaboration with government officials along with IBM, the project’s Lead Strategic Partner.
Blockchain technologies could reduce banks transaction costs by $15 billion to $20 billion a year by 2022. As it removes layers of intermediaries, manual processing, re-work and processing errors, along with the associated costs, it could generate a potential savings on transaction costsof as high as 75 per cent. The application of lockchain technology has to potential to transform world markets by significantly reducing infrastructure costs, fraud and fees, driving the growth of global markets. Financial services and real estate, technology, media and telecommunications, energy and resources, consumer and industrial products are all industries with the potential to be transformed.