India's Union Cabinet has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with regards to collaboration between member countries on blockchain research. China, the lead country in the BRICS council, is a staunch supporter of the technology and aims to adopt widespread use of blockchain in everyday transactions.
The Union Cabinet, led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, represented India in the signing. Brazil, Russia, China, and South Africa, meanwhile, were represented by their respective officials. The MOU is on a joint study of blockchain to develop processes similar to it, Coin Telegraph reports. The BRICS has met since 2009 to discuss beneficial processes for the member states, and blockchain is only one of the many ideas they agreed upon.
Each member state's respective national bank will participate in this study. Coin Caps highlights that the Brazilian National Bank for Economic and Social Development (BNDES), the State Corporation Bank for Development and Foreign Economic Affairs (Vnesheconombank), the Export-Import Bank of India, the China Development Bank, and the Development Bank of Southern Africa (DBSA) is participating.
India, for its part, wants to learn as much as it can about the distributed ledger technology (DLT,) as well as learn which areas it can be applied on to improve efficiency and speed of processes. When the initiative was offered at the 10th International BRICS Summit, India did not hesitate to agree to the MoU. The agreement to research blockchain was only one of the many discussions on member countries preparing for the arrival of the 'fourth industrial revolution.'
In India, the first state to fully embrace blockchain application on processes was the state of Telangana. It has a MoU of its own, signed with companies that deal with blockchain. The Indian state wanted to study and apply blockchain processes as much as it can on its own transactions. In Africa, meanwhile, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe aims to develop its own foray into learning blockchain processes.
RBZ governor John Mangudya explained that the bank is looking at embracing this technology fully. The blockchain is increasingly becoming the future, and the bank-through its governor-wants to be on top of things. It is a trend that has fully caught on elsewhere in the world.
Nonmember states US and Thailand are fully embracing a world with blockchain. The Bank of America (BoA) filed a patent seeking to create a blockchain-rooted process for them; the Bank of Thailand (BoT), meanwhile, will use blockchain to avoid fraud and facilitate cross-border payments better.
