Blockchain and Covid-19 | Key Takeaways from Webinar ‘Blockchain, China’s Story’

Technology, Financials, Automotive Author: Shuhong Chenli Editor: Luke Sheehan May 06, 2020 11:10 PM (GMT+8)

EqualOcean held an online event on April 26. Here is what our speakers thought about how blockchain technology can be of help in the global pandemic.

WIM Salon is a technology and innovation-focused event organized by EqualOcean.

On April 26, a few weeks after industry report ‘Blockchain, China’s Story’ was published, EqualOcean held a live webinar on the similar topic. We invited corporate strategy expert and, vice president at Huawei William Genovese, two executives from local blockchain startups – Fuzamei Technology vice president Cao Jing and Mark Xuan, a co-founder of Ziggurat IT – and well-known tech influencer Antonio Grasso, who is also the founder and CEO of Digital Business Innovation Srl. 

In this series of follow-up articles, we will walk through selected insights shared by our guest speakers. The topics include:

Blockchain as a concept

Blockchain adoption

State support in China and other countries

Blockchain and COVID-19

Blockchain in 2020

How can we leverage the blockchain technology to meet the current challenges brought by the pandemic?

Antonio: I think one important aspect of the adoption of blockchain technology addresses the COVID-19 is to manage contact tracing. In tracing the potential patients, a lot of sensitive data involves privacy problems, which is where I think distributed ledger technology can help us to manage and store the tracing history regarding potential patients.

Cao: What blockchain can do under the pandemic is to rebuild the distrust situation. We see now countries do not trust the data regarding COVID-19 provided by each other, which is because, to a large extent, these data come from the government rather than directly provided by citizens themselves. So people from different groups do not trust each other, which constitutes a big problem worldwide. However, if all the information we need or we want to use comes from the general public rather than a single source, people are more likely to trust it. And this process of trust rebuilding is what blockchain can take part in, based on its idea of decentralization.