Texas Blockchain Council announces new proof of concept

The council spearheaded a blockchain proof of concept presented to the Texas Secretary of State by Hyland and Hedera Hashgraph

The newly-formed Texas Blockchain Council, a trade association that promotes the use of blockchain technology in Texas, yesterday announced that they had spearheaded a proof of concept to evaluate the use of blockchain technology in securing and verifying records issued by the government. The proof of concept was presented to the Texas Secretary of State by Hyland and Hedera Hashgraph.

Hedera Hashgraph is an enterprise-grade distributed ledger technology (DLT) and the governing council of Hedera includes Google, IBM, Boeing and University College London. The public and decentralised nature of their platform makes it well-suited for building secure and trusted applications.

Mance Harmon, Co-founder and CEO of Hedera Hashgraph, explained, “Hedera makes it practical and cost-effective to bring the transparency and accountability of blockchain/public ledgers to a wide variety of identity, compliance, fraud mitigation, and other use cases. We’re thrilled to show the Texas Secretary of State and Hyland how blockchain/public ledgers enable government agencies to cost-effectively deliver next-generation services to their constituents.”

Hyland is a leading content services provider for organisations around the world which specialises in providing software to process requests of citizen documents. It uses blockchain technology to secure the electronic documents it issues and has been named a leader in the 2020 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Content Services Platforms.

Natalie Smolenski, who leads business development for Hyland’s blockchain solutions, said, “A blockchain can be utilised as a digital notary. That makes it perfect for validating official records, including identity documents and credentials. Governments will be adopting blockchain to prevent fraud, mitigate risk, create efficiencies, and lower costs.”

The proposal announced yesterday relates to Apostilles, an internationally recognised method of authenticating public documents, usually issued by Secretaries of State in the US. An agreement known as the Apostille Convention codified the process in 1961 at the Hague Conference on Private International Law, meaning that government-issued Apostilles are recognised as legally valid documents in all 118 countries which signed the convention. The proof of concept is focused on evaluating blockchain technology as a means to issue electronic Apostilles, or e-Apostilles.