The Impact of Blockchain Technology in Public Services: Lessons Learned

The public sector is still considered a potential domain to increase its level of digitization. Blockchain/DLT-based solutions are a valid option to increase efficiency, transparency, persistence, and, generally, increase trust in the digitized solution. Unfortunately, solutions based on blockchain/DLT present technological and organizational barriers that come along with the distributed nature of that technology. The TOKEN project was established to tackle such challenges. It aims to develop a service platform and components to shield all blockchain-related complexities from public services and provide easily accessible blockchain-based services. The areas that TOKEN was planned to cover are notarization, persistent storage, identity management, and messaging and event streaming. To prove the usefulness of TOKEN, four pioneer use cases of selected public services had to be developed on top of TOKEN. The lessons learned from integrating TOKEN into public services showed that these public services mostly only used a small subset of the available service and that their use was often not essential for the success of the public service. Additionally, the shielding of the blockchain by TOKEN shifted trust in the blockchain network away from trust in the correct operation of TOKEN. That is no longer experienced as a distributed-decentralized solution but only as a single access point. Further, the launch of the European Blockchain Services Infrastructure (EBSI) with a similar set of services and the lack of early adopters of TOKEN led to a loss of interest in governing the results in the future as a community-driven organization.