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Procivis sets out to replace government services with blockchain alternatives

Swiss blockchain startup Procivis recently announced their existence and a proof of concept software program. Describing it as an “e-government as a service platform,” the Procivis platform is designed to “enable the digitization of societies and the provision of online public services across the globe.”

Swiss blockchain startup Procivis recently announced their existence and a proof of concept software program. Describing it as an “e-government as a service platform,” the Procivis platform is designed to “enable the digitization of societies and the provision of online public services across the globe.”

The software, demonstrated at Microsoft’s public sector digitization practice day event in Bern, Switzerland, showed a mobile phone-based e-voting application that gives citizens a tamper-proof identity. It also allowed them to vote using this identity from their smartphones.

While e-voting was the first app demonstrated, the platform is designed to host a government-curated app store that offers many public services, such as tax filing, land registration, and commercial business registration. Procivis is currently looking to raise venture funding to develop the rest of their platform.

“By bringing Estonia’s leading e-government experts on board and adding our blockchain experience, our aim is to create a platform that can serve as the future electronic backbone of democracies across the globe.”
— – Daniel Gasteiger, Procivis

Identity management is being touted as the main platform application, letting users opt-in to sharing their details with specific third parties. Other applications briefly mentioned include signing an electronic signature, interacting with your ‘cabinet’ or elected representatives, filing for a commercial business license, contacting legal resources, filing taxes, interacting with the police, and even accessing the state welfare system. All of these services would be integrated with Procivis’ identify system and verify each user using their peer-to-peer network.

As for security, Procivis imagines using a smartphone’s Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) to store sensitive information, and residents could use a biometric scan like their fingerprint along with a pin code for authorization.

Procivis sets out to replace government services

The startup has been in stealth mode since it’s founding by Swiss blockchain entrepreneur Daniel Gasteiger late in 2016. Gasteiger previously worked with the Eastern European country of Estonia, which is known for progressive adoption of new technology. Having launched the world’s first online voting app in 2005, the country has since established a free public wifi network that initially spanned the capital city of Tallinn. Today that network covers 95 percent of the country.

“Learning about the level of digitization of the public sector in Estonia left me deeply impressed,” states Gasteiger. “By bringing Estonia’s leading e-government experts on board and adding our blockchain experience, our aim is to create a platform that can serve as the future electronic backbone of democracies across the globe.”

Estonia was the first country to offer their citizens a resident card with public key cryptography technology to safeguard their identity. The key cards grant Estonians access to more than 1,000 government services offered online by the government website today, allowing for benefits to be accessed, and residential services like utilities and taxes to be paid. The cards can also authorize digital signatures for online documents in Estonia, which are considered legally binding throughout the EU.

The small Northern Europe country also offers e-residency services to people from other countries, providing many of the same efficiencies for activities such as business incorporation. “In Estonia we believe that people should be able to freely choose their digital/public services best fit to them, regardless of the geographical area where they were arbitrarily born,” said e-Residency Program Director Kaspar Korjus. “We’re truly living in exciting times when nation states and virtual nations compete and collaborate with each other on an international market, to provide better governance services.”

Director Korjus has been working with Procivis, and brings with him a wealth of experience to the platform. “I’ve visited most of the emerging digital societies around the globe, and they all experience similar struggles,” Korjus said in the Procivis announcement.

“Procivis has a unique opportunity to build a solution that will help overcome these hurdles, boost the digitization of entire countries and empower its citizens. It’s a bold ambition, and I’m excited to be part of it.”
— – Kaspar Korjus

Estonia has also been working with Bitnation since December 2015. The blockchain technology-focused organization offers a blockchain-based public notary service to Estonia’s e-residency program, replacing the legacy service with a blockchain timestamp based alternative, that is free to use.

Bitnation is a Swedish-based open-source coalition attempting to replace all types of government services with blockchain alternatives, from issuing citizenship up to their own space program. The website even offers the public a way to create an online nation, certified on the ethereum blockchain. Bitnation’s founder, Susanne Tarkowski Tempelhof, said that the Estonian government “understands the dynamics of the globalization era far better than any other government.”

The results of a study that compared the evolution of Switzerland and Estonia as digital societies over the past twenty years was also announced during the talk at Microsoft. Coordinated by Prof. Dr. Alexander Trechsel of the Zurich-based consulting firm Xupery, and co-authored by political scientists Dr. Maarit Ströbele and Nele Leosk, it points out the differences between the two countries’ approaches to stepping into the digital age.

Implementation of an e-government and its various applications is globally associated with low adoption rates, the study claims. To successfully deliver digital public services with political support, acountry must foster “strong public-private partnerships to develop efficient and user centered services in an iterative manner,” which requires a “clear strategy and timeline to introduce digital identities for every citizen.”

“The study has revealed the particular strengths of Estonia’s approach, which made the country a poster child for e-government. Our research also shows that, despite having the reputation of being one of the most innovative countries, Switzerland so far hasn’t sufficiently seized the opportunities of digitization in the public sector.”
— – Prof. Dr. Treschsel, Xupery


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