Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain

Distributed LedgerTechnology:
beyond block chain
A report by the UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser

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Contents
Foreword..................................................................................................................4
Executive Summary and Recommendations......................................................5
Definitions..............................................................................................................17
Chapter 1: Vision...................................................................................................21
Chapter 2: Technology.........................................................................................33
Case study – Research and horizon scanning...........................................37
Chapter 3: Governance and Regulation.............................................................41
Chapter 4: Security and Privacy..........................................................................47
Chapter 5: Disruptive Potential...........................................................................53
Case study – Diamonds................................................................................56
Case study – Corporate actions...................................................................58
Case study – SETLing transactions.............................................................60
Chapter 6: Applications in Government.............................................................65
Chapter 7: Global Perspectives...........................................................................73
Case study – European energy retail market ............................................76
Case study – Estonian block chains transform paying,
trading and signing........................................................................................80
References.............................................................................................................84
Acknowledgements..............................................................................................87
A short video has been made to accompany this report which can be viewed
at: https://youtu.be/4sm5LNqL5j0

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Foreword
The progress of mankind is marked by the rise of new technologies and the
human ingenuity they unlock.
In distributed ledger technology, we may be witnessing one of those potential
explosions of creative potential that catalyse exceptional levels of innovation.
The technology could prove to have the capacity to deliver a new kind of trust to
a wide range of services. As we have seen open data revolutionise the citizen’s
relationship with the state, so may the visibility in these technologies reform our
financial markets, supply chains, consumer and business-to-business services,
and publicly-held registers.
We know there will be challenges as Distributed Ledgers mature and disrupt
how we think about and store data. The UK is in a unique position to explore
those challenges and help maximise the benefits to our public services and our
economy. We already have world-class digital capability, innovative financial
services, a strong research community and growing private sector expertise.
It is vital that our key assets – including the Alan Turing Institute, Open Data
Institute and the Digital Catapult – work together with the private sector and with
international partners to unlock the full potential of this technology.
We are both, therefore, delighted to be jointly leading efforts in this area, and look
forward to working with other departments on seizing the opportunity as well as
understanding how its use can be implemented for the benefit of UK citizens and
the economy.
THE RT HON MATTHEW HANCOCK MP
Minister for the Cabinet Office
and Paymaster General
THE RT HON ED VAIZEY MP
Minister of State for Culture
and The Digital Economy

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Executive Summary and
Recommendations
Introduction
Algorithms that enable the creation of distributed ledgers are powerful, disruptive
innovations that could transform the delivery of public and private services and
enhance productivity through a wide range of applications.
Ledgers have been at the heart of commerce since ancient times and are used to
record many things, most commonly assets such as money and property. They
have moved from being recorded on clay tablets to papyrus, vellum and paper.
However, in all this time the only notable innovation has been computerisation,
which initially was simply a transfer from paper to bytes. Now, for the first time
algorithms enable the collaborative creation of digital distributed ledgers with
properties and capabilities that go far beyond traditional paper-based ledgers.
A distributed ledger is essentially an asset database that can be shared across
a network of multiple sites, geographies or institutions. All participants within
a network can have their own identical copy of the ledger. Any changes to the
ledger are reflected in all copies in minutes, or in some cases, seconds. The
assets can be financial, legal, physical or electronic. The security and accuracy
of the assets stored in the ledger are maintained cryptographically through the
use of ‘keys’ and signatures to control who can do what within the shared ledger.
Entries can also be updated by one, some or all of the participants, according to
rules agreed by the network.
Underlying this technology is the ‘block chain’, which was invented to create
the peer-to-peer digital cash Bitcoin in 2008. Block chain algorithms enable
Bitcoin transactions to be aggregated in ‘blocks’ and these are added to a
‘chain’ of existing blocks using a cryptographic signature. The Bitcoin ledger is
constructed in a distributed and ‘permissionless’ fashion, so that anyone can
add a block of transactions if they can solve a new cryptographic puzzle to add
each new block. The incentive for doing this is that there is currently a reward
in the form of twenty five Bitcoins awarded to the solver of the puzzle for each
‘block’. Anyone with access to the internet and the computing power to solve
the cryptographic puzzles can add to the ledger and they are known as ‘Bitcoin
miners’. The mining analogy is apt because the process of mining Bitcoin is
energy intensive as it requires very large computing power. It has been estimated
that the energy requirements to run Bitcoin are in excess of 1GW and may be
comparable to the electricity usage of Ireland.
Bitcoin is an online equivalent of cash. Cash is authenticated by its physical
appearance and characteristics, and in the case of banknotes by serial numbers
and other security devices. But in the case of cash there is no ledger that records
transactions and there is a problem with forgeries of both coins and notes. In the
case of Bitcoins, the ledger of transactions ensures their authenticity. Both coins
and Bitcoins need to be stored securely in real or virtual wallets respectively
— and if these are not looked after properly, both coins and Bitcoins can be
stolen. A fundamental difference between conventional currency and Bitcoins is
that the former are issued by central banks, and the latter are issued in agreed

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amounts by the global ‘collaborative’ endeavour that is Bitcoin. Cash as a means
of exchange and commerce dates back millennia and in that respect there is a
lineage that links cowrie shells, hammered pennies and Bitcoin.
But this report is not about Bitcoin. It is about the algorithmic technologies
that enable Bitcoin and their power to transform ledgers as tools to record,
enable and secure an enormous range of transactions. So the basic block
chain approach can be modified to incorporate rules, smart contracts, digital
signatures and an array of other new tools.
Distributed ledger technologies have the potential to help governments to
collect taxes, deliver benefits, issue passports, record land registries, assure the
supply chain of goods and generally ensure the integrity of government records
and services. In the NHS, the technology offers the potential to improve health
care by improving and authenticating the delivery of services and by sharing
records securely according to exact rules. For the consumer of all of these
services, the technology offers the potential, according to the circumstances, for
individual consumers to control access to personal records and to know who has
accessed them.
Existing methods of data management, especially of personal data, typically
involve large legacy IT systems located within a single institution. To these are
added an array of networking and messaging systems to communicate with
the outside world, which adds cost and complexity. Highly centralised systems
present a high cost single point of failure. They may be vulnerable to cyber-
attack and the data is often out of sync, out of date or simply inaccurate.
In contrast, distributed ledgers are inherently harder to attack because instead of
a single database, there are multiple shared copies of the same database, so a
cyber-attack would have to attack all the copies simultaneously to be successful.
The technology is also resistant to unauthorised change or malicious tampering,
in that the participants in the network will immediately spot a change to one part
of the ledger. Added to this, the methods by which information is secured and
updated mean that participants can share data and be confident that all copies
of the ledger at any one time match each other.
But this is not to say that distributed ledgers are invulnerable to cyber-attack,
because in principle anyone who can find a way to ‘legitimately’ modify one copy
will modify all copies of the ledger. So ensuring the security of distributed ledgers
is an important task and part of the general challenge of ensuring the security of
the digital infrastructure on which modern societies now depend.
Governments are starting to apply distributed ledger technologies to conduct
their business. The Estonian government has been experimenting with
distributed ledger technology for a number of years using a form of distributed
ledger technology known as Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI), developed by
an Estonian company, Guardtime.
KSI allows citizens to verify the integrity of their records on government
databases. It also appears to make it impossible for privileged insiders to
perform illegal acts inside the government networks. This ability to assure
citizens that their data are held securely and accurately has helped Estonia to
launch digital services such as e-Business Register and e-Tax. These reduce the

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administrative burden on the state and the citizen. Estonia is one of the ‘Digital
5’ or D5 group of nations, of which the other members are the UK, Israel, New
Zealand and South Korea. There are opportunities for the UK to work with and
learn from these and other like-minded governments in the implementation of
block chain and related technologies.
The business community has been quick to appreciate the possibilities.
Distributed ledgers can provide new ways of assuring ownership and
provenance for goods and intellectual property. For example, Everledger
provides a distributed ledger that assures the identity of diamonds, from being
mined and cut to being sold and insured. In a market with a relatively high level
of paper forgery, it makes attribution more efficient, and has the potential to
reduce fraud and prevent ‘blood diamonds’ from entering the market.
An important challenge for this new set of technologies is communication of its
significance to policymakers and to the public — this is one of the important
purposes of this report.
The first difficulty in communication is the strong association of block chain
technology with Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a type of cryptocurrency, so called because
cryptography underpins the supply and tracking of the currency. Bitcoin
creates suspicion amongst citizens and government policymakers because
of its association with criminal transactions and ‘dark web’ trading sites, such
as the now defunct Silk Road. But digital cryptocurrencies are of interest to
central banks and government finance departments around the world which are
studying them with great interest. This is because the electronic distribution of
digital cash offers potential efficiencies and, unlike physical cash, it brings with it
a ledger of transactions that is absent from physical cash.
The second difficulty in communication is the bewildering array of terminology.
This terminology is clarified by Simon Taylor who has provided a set of
definitions at the end of this summary. A particular term that can cause confusion
is ‘distributed’, which can lead to the misconception that because something is
distributed there is therefore no overall controlling authority or owner. This may
or may not be the case — it depends on the design of the ledger. In practice,
there is a broad spectrum of distributed ledger models, with different degrees
of centralisation and different types of access control, to suit different business
needs. These may be ‘unpermissioned’ ledgers that are open to everyone to
contribute data to the ledger and cannot be owned; or ‘permissioned’ ledgers
that may have one or many owners and only they can add records and verify the
contents of the ledger.
The key message is that, by fully understanding the technology, government
and the private sector can choose the design that best fits a particular purpose,
balancing security and central control with the convenience and opportunity of
sharing data between institutions and individuals.
As with most new technologies, the full extent of future uses and abuses is
only visible dimly. And in the case of every new technology the question is not
whether the technology is ‘in and of itself’ a good thing or a bad thing. The
questions are: what application of the technology? for what purpose? and
applied in what way and with what safeguards?

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To help answer these questions, the Government Office of Science established
a senior group of experts from business, government and academia to assess
the opportunities for distributed ledgers to be used within government and the
private sector, and to determine what actions government and others need to
take to facilitate the beneficial use of distributed ledger technology and to avoid
possible harms. The aim was to decrypt the terminology behind the technology
for policy audiences and provide policymakers with the vision and evidence to
help them to decide where action is necessary, and how best to deploy it.
In summary, distributed ledger technology provides the framework for
government to reduce fraud, corruption, error and the cost of paper-intensive
processes. It has the potential to redefine the relationship between government
and the citizen in terms of data sharing, transparency and trust. It has similar
possibilities for the private sector.
This executive summary now sets out the eight main recommendations from our
work. These are presented in the context of a summary of the key points from
the seven chapters of evidence which cover vision, technology, governance,
privacy and security, disruptive potential, applications and global perspective.
The chapters have been written by experts in distributed ledger technology in a
style that should be accessible to non-experts. I am extremely grateful to these
experts for their guidance and thoughtful contributions.
Mark Walport, Chief Scientific Adviser to HM Government, December 2015

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Vision
Distributed ledgers offer a range of benefits to government and to other public
and private sector organisations. As their name implies, they can be distributed
extremely widely in a precisely controlled fashion. They are highly efficient
because changes by any participant with the necessary permission to modify
the ledger are immediately reflected in all copies of the ledger. They can be
equally robust in rejecting unauthorised changes, so corrupting the ledger is
extremely difficult. However, distributed ledgers should not be seen as an end
in themselves. It is only when they have other applications — such as smart
contracts — layered on top on them, that their full potential can be realised.
The first role for government in supporting the development of distributed
ledgers is to develop a clear vision of how this technology can improve the way
government does its business and is able to deliver services to citizens. This
needs to be followed by government acting as an expert customer to implement
the technology — procuring distributed ledger solutions where they are
applicable. In doing so, government can support and influence the development
of economic activity in this sector, including new and growing businesses as well
as larger incumbent businesses.
The opportunity is for government to enable a future where the delivery of
government services is more personal, immediate and efficient. Wherever
appropriate, citizens should have the opportunity to signal their individual
preferences and needs through participation in smart contracts. The
implementation of distributed ledgers with embedded smart contracts
should lead to substantial improvements in compliance, cost-efficiency and
accountability.
The UK Government Digital Service is developing a digital platform for
government to deliver its services and distributed ledgers could be at the heart
of this.
Recommendation 1: We recommend that government should:
• Provide ministerial leadership to ensure that government provides the
vision, leadership and the platform for distributed ledger technology within
government. Specifically, the Government Data Service should lead work in
government as a user of distributed ledgers and the DCMS Digital Economy
Unit should lead work on government as an enabler of distributed ledgers
(working with the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills and with
Innovate UK).
• The Government Digital Service and the DCMS Digital Economy Unit should
develop a high-level capability road map and a supporting outline plan based
on the work of this report and very early stage activity already underway in
departments, and deliver this in a timely fashion; and continue to oversee the
recommendations made in the rest of this report, to maintain momentum and
rapid action. In undertaking this work, they should work closely with other
government departments and with industry and academia and should consider
setting up a time-limited expert advisory group in support.

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Technology
Distributed ledger technology is still at a very early stage of development. The
development of block chain technology is but the first, though very important
step towards a disruptive revolution in ledger technology that could transform
the conduct of public and private sector organisations. The technology can be
adopted so that ‘legitimate’ changes to ledgers can be made in principle by
anyone (an ‘unpermissioned’ ledger), or by a limited number of individuals or
even a single authorised person (in a ‘permissioned’ ledger). For government
applications, ‘permissioned’ ledgers are likely to be more appealing than
Bitcoin’s unpermissioned model, because they allow the owner, or owners, of the
data to enforce rules on who is and is not allowed to use the system. Distributed
ledgers have the added advantage of moving a lot of the complexity of managing
security into the background, making systems easier and cheaper to use.
There are many unsolved problems to tackle before the full potential of this
and related technologies can be realised, including the resolution of issues of
privacy, security, performance and scalability. There is also an extraordinary array
of opportunities to develop algorithms that will add sophistication to ledgers
by supporting ‘smart’ contracts, signatures and other applications. These
will enhance and diversify the value and range of uses of ledgers. This field is
developing rapidly and many of these problems are already being investigated
and, in some cases, solved. If government waits for ‘perfect’ solutions, it will
miss the opportunity to shape and procure implementations of the technology
that will provide maximum benefit to the public sector, and the UK may lose
opportunities for economic benefit as well.
As well as ensuring that the technology is robust and scalable, we need to
understand the ethical and social implications of different potential uses and
the financial costs and benefits of adoption. With respect to research and
development, the UK is in a good position, though we cannot take this for
granted as there is interest and competition in development of distributed ledger
technology around the world.
The research councils are playing an important role, led by the EPSRC and
ESRC, supporting research in universities and in the newly-created Alan Turing
Institute. There is also an important role for business to invest in research and
development, and key opportunities for joint public and private investment
to tackle generic problems around security, privacy and the development of
standards — all areas where industrial advantage will be gained by co-operation
rather than competition.
Existing digital investments by the government and private sector include the
Digital Catapult, Future Cities Catapult and Open Data Institute. Added to this are
groupings such as the Whitechapel Think Tank which can provide a focal point
for discussion and sharing ideas. This means that the UK is in a good position
from which to build a solid distributed ledger research and testing capability. But
there is a danger that we will not get the most from this potentially fragmented
activity and there is a strong case that the research and development community
in the public and private sectors should ‘self-organise’ in a way that encourages
co-operation where appropriate and competition where it will stimulate the most
creative research.

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Our next two recommendations are aimed at encouraging further research and
establishing UK capability to trial and experiment with different distributed ledger
solutions:
Recommendation 2: The UK research community should invest in the research
required to ensure that distributed ledgers are scalable, secure and provide proof
of correctness of their contents. They need to provide high-performance, low-
latency operations, appropriate to the domain within which the technology is
being deployed. They need to be energy efficient. The newly-created Alan Turing
Institute, working with groupings such as the Whitechapel Think Tank, could play
an important role in co-ordinating and ‘self-organising’ the public and private
research and development sector interested in this and related technologies. The
private sector should consider investing in the Alan Turing Institute to support
the pre-competitive research that will ultimately facilitate new commercial
applications that are robust and secure. This includes work on obvious areas
such as cryptography and cybersecurity but also extends to the development of
new types of algorithm.
Recommendation 3: Government could support the creation of distributed ledger
demonstrators for local government that will bring together all the elements
necessary to test the technology and its application. A demonstrator at a city
level could provide important opportunities for trialling and implementing
distributed ledger technologies. Innovate UK could use its work with cities in the
development of ‘city deals’ to implement the development of a city demonstrator.
Governance
Effective governance and regulation are key to the successful implementation
of distributed ledgers. Governance comprises the rules set by the owners and
participants of the ledger that safeguard their private interests. This needs to be
supplemented by regulation and / or legislation, which comprises the framework
of rules that are set by an outside authority to protect the broader interests
of society. Government legislates and creates the framework for regulation,
singly or in partnership with other governments, and usually creates or enlists a
regulator accountable to government to undertake the work.
In the case of the digital world, there are two sets of rules or codes that control
the operation of digital technologies. The first is the classical set of rules
provided by the legislative framework, the code of law and regulation. The
second is the set of rules that determine the operation of the algorithms encoded
by the software. This is the technical code, and there needs to be at least as
much focus on ensuring the rigour of the technical code as on legislative code.
Successful implementation of a distributed ledger will require a combination
of governance to protect the participants and stakeholders and regulation to
ensure the system is resilient to systemic risk or criminal activity. The challenge
is to strike the balance between safeguarding the interests of participants in
the system and the broader interests of society whilst avoiding the stifling of
innovation by excessively rigid structures.
There are also opportunities to take advantage of the potential interactions
between legal and technical code. For example, public regulatory influence
could be exerted through a combination of legal and technical code, rather

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than exclusively through legal code as at present. In essence technical code
could be used to assure compliance with legal code, and, in doing so, reduce
the costs of legal compliance. This could provide a ‘use case’ for the use of
technology to enhance regulation, so-called RegTech, which formed one of the
key recommendations of the FinTech report from the Government Office for
Science1
.
Determining the optimum balance between governance and regulation, and
between legal code and technical code, is going to require unusual mixes of
skills, including the need for lawyers, mathematicians and computer experts to
work together to resolve many of the key issues, which are outlined in Chapter 3.
Recommendation 4: Government needs to consider how to put in place a
regulatory framework for distributed ledger technology. Regulation will need to
evolve in parallel with the development of new implementations and applications
of the technology. As part of the consideration of regulation, government should
also consider how regulatory goals could be achieved using technical code as
well as legal code. The DCMS Digital Economy Unit could take ownership of this
recommendation.
Security and privacy
Criminals have moved away from cracking metal safes and bank vaults. The
money is now in their digital equivalents and these are proving vulnerable to the
hackers and crackers of the codes of the digital world. The cryptographic codes
of the digital world are extremely hard to break, but however hard these may be,
they can be vulnerable to being bypassed. Bypass mechanisms range from the
human, who may give away the key accidentally or deliberately, to the presence
of ‘back doors’ due to deficiencies in the software code. The hardware hosting
distributed ledgers may provide additional vulnerabilities and equal attention
should be paid to the resilience and security of hardware systems.
In the case of Bitcoin, the ‘wallets’ that hold the currency have proved vulnerable
to theft — but the ledger itself has remained resilient, though in principle it would
be vulnerable if over 50% of the computer processing power for the Bitcoin
ledger fell into the hands of a single malevolent individual or organisation.
Indeed, a great strength of distributed ledgers is that they should be highly
resilient to attack.
However, it is not only the integrity of the ledger that matters. Privacy and
confidentiality are also key issues. Depending on the nature of the ledger, it may
hold personal confidential records that could range from financial to familial and
health. The opportunity is for distributed ledger technologies to provide much
greater security for these data than is available in current databases, but this
is not a given. This is another area where much research and development is
needed as part of the development of the technology.
Security and privacy are areas where Government has an important role to play,
so our next recommendation is:
Recommendation 5: Government needs to work with academia and industry to
ensure that standards are set for the integrity, security and privacy of distributed
ledgers and their contents. These standards need to be reflected in both
regulatory and software code.

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For each particular use of the technology, government and private sector users,
as appropriate, should conduct a bespoke risk assessment to identify the
relevant threats. The Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI)
and CESG should keep a watching brief on distributed ledger technology and
play a central role inside and outside government in providing expert advice on
ensuring the integrity, security and privacy of distributed ledgers. As suggested
in recommendation 2, the newly created Alan Turing Institute, working with
groupings such as the Whitechapel Think Tank and with CESG could play an
important role in co-ordinating and ‘self-organising’ the public and private
research and development sector.
It must not be overlooked that the software and hardware systems can become
degraded over time, as better technology emerges and hostile agents learn
‘new tricks’. So for systems intended to have a long lifetime, the initial design
should make it straightforward to update hardware and software components
during that lifetime. Additionally, as part of trialling new implementations of the
technology, it is important to include penetration testing at both the system and
user levels.
Trust and interoperability
As set out in Chapter 7 on global perspectives, trust is a risk judgement
between two or more people, organisations or nations. In cyberspace, trust is
based on two key requirements: prove to me that you are who you say you are
(authentication); and prove to me that you have the permissions necessary to do
what you ask (authorisation). In return, I will prove to you that I am trustworthy by
delivering services or products to you in a secure, efficient and reliable fashion.
Authentication and identification are interlinked but they are not the same thing.
Authentication does not require that I know your identity but it does require that
you provide me a token that is inextricably linked to your identity, for example
the pin number associated with a credit or debit card, or a fingerprint allied to a
biometric passport or other document. Equally, when I provide my authentication
token to you, I need assurance that I am providing it to the correct individual or
organisation, ie that you are who you claim to be. So it is equally important that
organisations can provide authentication to their users, be they individuals, other
organisations or government.
The opportunity in the digital environment is to use and create much more
powerful and robust identity management tools that provide authentication whilst
protecting privacy. One such system is public key infrastructure (PKI) relying on
a cryptographic standard called X.509. Organisations using PKI can federate in
order to provide, share and potentially simplify the secure delivery of services
or products. Another important international standard is being developed for
organisational identification, known as the Register of Legal Organisations
(ROLO), and this may help to underpin the authentication of organisations as
opposed to individuals.
Another key enabler of secure authenticated interactions by individual users
is the use of smartphones as the de facto trusted user device. The latest
smart phones incorporate important security features such as a ‘Trusted
Platform Module’, which secures digital certificates and cryptographic keys for
authentication, encryption and signing, and a ‘Trusted Execution Environment’

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and a ‘Trusted User Interface’, each of which are resistant to interference by
‘malware’.
This discussion of authentication shows that, in order to maximise the
power of distributed ledgers, these may need to be interoperable with
other ledgers. However, maximising the potential of interoperability goes far
beyond interoperability of authentication — it requires agreements about data
interoperability, policy interoperability and the effective implementation of
international standards.
Recommendation 6: This recommendation is linked to Recommendation 5.
Government needs to work with academia and industry to ensure that the most
effective and usable identification and authentication protocols are implemented
for both individuals and organisations. This work needs to go hand in hand with
the development and implementation of international standards.
A disruptive future – some potential use cases for
government
Distributed ledgers have the potential to be radically disruptive. Their processing
capability is real time, near tamper-proof and increasingly low-cost. They can be
applied to a wide range of industries and services, such as financial services, real
estate, healthcare and identity management. They can underpin other software-
and hardware-based innovations such as smart contracts and the Internet of
Things. Furthermore, their underlying philosophy of distributed consensus, open
source, transparency and community could be highly disruptive to many of these
sectors.
Like any radical innovation, as well as providing opportunities distributed ledgers
create threats to those who fail or are unable to respond. In particular, through
their distributed consensual nature they may be perceived as threatening the role
of trusted intermediaries in positions of control within traditionally hierarchical
organisations such as banks and government departments.
With its wide range of stakeholders, services and roles, the government has a
multitude of different operations. Some distribute value rather than create it, and
others create and maintain effective regulatory regimes. Many of these activities
will be enhanced by innovations afforded by distributed ledgers, and others will
be challenged.
Ultimately, the best way to develop a technology is to use it in practice. The
expert group that supported the development of this report has scoped some
specific examples of potential uses by the UK government, and these are set out
in five use case studies in Chapter 6
• protecting critical infrastructure against cyberattacks
• reducing operational costs and tracking eligibility for welfare support, while
offering greater financial inclusion
• transparency and traceability of how aid money is spent
• creating opportunities for economic growth, bolstering SMEs and increasing
employment
• reducing tax fraud

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Each of these case studies provides an overview of the distributed ledger
proposition, its potential benefits and an assessment of the maturity level of the
technology to deliver the application.
Only a tiny fraction of the possible applications are identified in this report but
we believe they provide a good starting point for government to start piloting
the technology within departments. So our final set of recommendations are
aimed at implementing trials of distributed ledger technology and developing
government capability:
Recommendation 7: Understanding the true potential of distributed ledgers
requires not only research but also using the technology for real life applications.
Government should establish trials of distributed ledgers in order to assess the
technology’s usability within the public sector.
We suggest that the trials should be co-ordinated in a similar fashion to the
way that clinical trials are implemented, reported and assessed, in order to
ensure uniformity and maximize the rigour of the process. The outcome of
these trials and the lessons learnt should feed into the road-map proposed in
Recommendation 1.
Areas where we believe work could be taken forward include the protection of
national infrastructure, reducing market friction for SMEs and the distribution of
funds from DWP and other government departments. During the development
of this report, we found a small number of officials who are already thinking
deeply about potential uses for distributed ledger technology by government.
We recommend that these individuals be strongly supported and encouraged to
move ahead in partnerships between government departments and GDS.
Recommendation 8: As well as top-down leadership and coordination, there is
also a need to build capability and skills within government. We recommend the
establishment of a cross-government community of interest, bringing together
the analytical and policy communities, to generate and develop potential ‘use
cases’ and create a body of knowledge and expertise within the civil service.
GDS and the Data Science Partnership between GDS, Office for National
Statistics, Cabinet Office and the Government Office for Science could act as
the convenors of this community of interest. There are important opportunities
for government to stimulate the business sector by acting as a smart customer in
procuring distributed ledger applications.
Conclusion – taking a global perspective
The UK is not alone in recognising the importance of distributed ledger
technologies. Other countries, large and small, are already moving quickly to
adopt distributed ledgers — and the case study of Estonia shows how quickly a
small country with an effective digitally-aware leadership can progress. However,
there is still time for the UK to position itself within this leading group — indeed,
it is essential for it to do so, given the importance of the financial and services
sector to the UK economy.
Patrick Curry, Christopher Sier and Mike Halsall have considered in Chapter 7
the features of advancing digital nations and argue that the hallmarks of these
include:

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• A digitally-informed leadership
• An empowered focused government department for all national digital
transformation, which is internationally minded and collaborates closely with
all industry sectors
• A living, collaborative national plan, which is industry-led with government
investment
• Technologically aware, qualified and experienced senior political officials in
every government organisation
• Engineers and digital business leaders as politicians
We are still at the early stages of an extraordinary post-industrial revolution
driven by information technology. It is a revolution is bringing important new
benefits and risks. It is already clear that, within this revolution, the advent of
distributed ledger technologies is starting to disrupt many of the existing ways of
doing business.
The earliest accounting records of humans date back to Babylon, Assyria and
Sumer, over 5000 years ago. Many clay tablets have survived as a record of
the early technological revolutions in the development of writing, counting and
money. It is less clear whether digital records will have the same longevity as clay
tablets. But, leaving that aside, it is clear that there is a huge opportunity for the
UK to develop and use distributed ledger technology for the benefit of citizens
and the economy. There are a series of ‘grand challenges’ to tackle to maximise
the benefits and minimise the harms of the extraordinary developments in
information technology. This report sets out some key recommendations for the
government, based on expert evidence. The most important of these is the need
for close partnership between the public and private sector, within the UK and
between the UK and other nations.

17
Definitions
The terminology of this new field is still evolving, with many using the terms block
chain (or blockchain), distributed ledger and shared ledger interchangeably.
Formal definitions are unlikely to satisfy all parties — but for the purposes of this
report, the key terms are as follows:
• A block chain is a type of database that takes a number of records and puts
them in a block (rather like collating them on to a single sheet of paper). Each
block is then ‘chained’ to the next block, using a cryptographic signature.
This allows block chains to be used like a ledger, which can be shared and
corroborated by anyone with the appropriate permissions.
There are many ways to corroborate the accuracy of a ledger, but they are
broadly known as consensus (the term ‘mining’ is used for a variant of this
process in the cryptocurrency Bitcoin) — see below.
If participants in that process are preselected, the ledger is permissioned. If
the process is open to everyone, the ledger is unpermissioned — see below.
The real novelty of block chain technology is that it is more than just a
database — it can also set rules about a transaction (business logic) that are
tied to the transaction itself. This contrasts with conventional databases, in
which rules are often set at the entire database level, or in the application, but
not in the transaction.
• Unpermissioned ledgers such as Bitcoin have no single owner — indeed,
they cannot be owned. The purpose of an unpermissioned ledger is to allow
anyone to contribute data to the ledger and for everyone in possession of the
ledger to have identical copies. This creates censorship resistance, which
means that no actor can prevent a transaction from being added to the ledger.
Participants maintain the integrity of the ledger by reaching a consensus
about its state.
Unpermissioned ledgers can be used as a global record that cannot be
edited: for declaring a last will and testament, for example, or assigning
property ownership. But they also pose a challenge to institutional power
structures and existing industries, and this may warrant a policy response.
• Permissioned ledgers may have one or many owners. When a new record
is added, the ledger’s integrity is checked by a limited consensus process.
This is carried out by trusted actors — government departments or banks,
for example — which makes maintaining a shared record much simpler that
the consensus process used by unpermissioned ledgers. Permissioned block
chains provide highly-verifiable data sets because the consensus process
creates a digital signature, which can be seen by all parties. Requiring many
government departments to validate a record could give a high degree of
confidence in the record’s security, for example, in contrast to the current
situation where departments often have to share data using pieces of paper. A
permissioned ledger is usually faster than an unpermissioned ledger.
• Distributed ledgers are a type of database that is spread across multiple
sites, countries or institutions, and is typically public. Records are stored one
after the other in a continuous ledger, rather than sorted into blocks, but they

18
can only be added when the participants reach a quorum.
A distributed ledger requires greater trust in the validators or operators of
the ledger. For example, the global financial transactions system Ripple
selects a list of validators (known as Unique Node Validators) from up to 200
known, unknown or partially known validators who are trusted not to collude
in defrauding the actors in a transaction. This process provides a digital
signature that is considered less censorship resistant than Bitcoin’s, but is
significantly faster.
• A shared ledger is a term coined by Richard Brown, formerly of IBM and
now Chief Technology Officer of the Distributed Ledger Group, which typically
refers to any database and application that is shared by an industry or private
consortium, or that is open to the public. It is the most generic and catch-all
term for this group of technologies.
A shared ledger may use a distributed ledger or block chain as its underlying
database, but will often layer on permissions for different types of users. As
such, ‘shared ledger’ represents a spectrum of possible ledger or database
designs that are permissioned at some level. An industry’s shared ledger
may have a limited number of fixed validators who are trusted to maintain the
ledger, which can offer significant benefits.
• Smart contracts are contracts whose terms are recorded in a computer
language instead of legal language. Smart contracts can be automatically
executed by a computing system, such as a suitable distributed ledger
system. The potential benefits of smart contracts include low contracting,
enforcement, and compliance costs; consequently it becomes economically
viable to form contracts over numerous low-value transactions. The potential
risks include a reliance on the computing system that executes the contract.
At this stage, the risks and benefits are largely theoretical because the
technology of smart contracts is still in its infancy, and some time away from
widespread deployment.

19
Figure courtesy of Dave Birch (Consult Hyperion)

20
CHAPTER 1
Vision
Digital currencies such as Bitcoin rely on an
underlying technology called a block chain.
This records every transaction made in identical
copies of a digital ledger that is shared among
users. This ‘shared ledger’ approach could
streamline a plethora of different services, both
in government and the wider economy.
Author
Simon Taylor,
VP for Blockchain R+D, Barclays

21
Chapter 1:Vision
Introduction
Digital currencies such as Bitcoin have pioneered a new approach to tracking
financial transactions. Their underlying technology — commonly called a block
chain — records every transaction made in that currency in identical copies of a
digital ledger that is shared among the currency’s users.
Financial institutions, regulators, central banks and governments are now
exploring the possibilities of using this ‘shared ledger’ approach to streamline a
plethora of different services, both in government and the wider economy.
Many of these potential applications are medium-term prospects, but the long
development cycles for government and the private sector, and the early promise
that significant efficiencies could be gained, suggest that ministers and civil
servants must now begin to consider how this technology could benefit them.
This chapter outlines those opportunities.
What is a shared ledger?
A shared ledger is essentially a database that keeps track of who owns a
financial, physical or electronic asset: a diamond, a unit of currency, or items
inside a shipping container, for example. Crucially, every participant can keep
a copy of the block chain, which is updated automatically every time a new
transaction occurs. The security and accuracy of the information is maintained
through mathematics — specifically by cryptography — to ensure that all copies
of the ledger match each other. Almost anything that exists on paper today could
exist on a shared ledger (see Chapter 2 for a more detailed discussion of shared
ledger technology).
Since its launch in 2008, Bitcoin has relied on block chain technology. Many
clichés and misconceptions have grown up around the digital currency and its
underlying principles. Its associations with Silk Road, the digital black market,
have left some people with the impression that Bitcoin is intrinsically linked to
money laundering and terrorists. That misconception continues to affect how
people think about block chain technology.
In fact, shared ledgers and databases may offer some major benefits to
government and financial services, thanks to four important properties of block
chain technologies.
1) Reconciliation Through Cryptography. Institutions such as businesses and
governments currently send messages to each other to pass on details of
transactions. Once the message is received, each institution then updates
its own ledger. But today, there is no easy way to ensure that these copies
match. Block chains can solve this in a number of ways: by simply sharing the
same underlying data, for example, or by providing ‘proof points’ to verify the
data. This approach could also be applicable to government data sets. The
different actors (users) of the ledger come to a consensus about the state of
the underlying data through a number of different consensus algorithms (eg
Proof of Work, Proof of Stake, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance).
2) Replicated to Many Institutions. Many parties can have a copy of some

22
or all of the data, making it less likely that there is a single point of failure.
Replication is a significant challenge for current database technologies,
creating cost and complexity in industry and government IT projects. An
additional benefit of this technology is that if one ledger is compromised, the
remainder are not. Many parties can also confirm that those records have
been added by performing the reconciliation calculations themselves.
3) Granular Access Control. Distributed ledgers use ‘keys’ and signatures
to control who can do what inside the shared ledger. These keys can be
assigned specific capabilities only under certain conditions. For example,
a regulator may have a ‘view key’ that allows it to see all of an institution’s
transactions, but only when a key owned by a court gives it permission
(control) to do so.
4) Granular Transparency and Privacy. Because many parties have a copy
of the ledger (point 1), and many parties can verify every record (point 2), a
shared ledger has a high degree of transparency. This allows a regulator or
an independent body such as the judiciary to see with confidence that the
contents of a database had not been edited or modified in any fraudulent
way. Given the right conditions, it also allows them to unlock records that
would otherwise be completely private and un-viewable. This could be useful
for businesses (eg banks) in their regulatory reporting, fraud prevention,
and could even empower citizens to hold the government to account (see
Chapter 5 for a more extensive discussion). Records are added with a unique
cryptographic signature that proves the right participant has added the right
record according to the right rules.
When combined, these properties can solve challenges that were previously very
expensive or challenging.
What is a smart contract?
If a block chain is the database, then the smart contract is the application
layer that makes much of the promise of block chain technology a reality. Most
conventional contracts have no direct relationship with the computer code that
executes them (see Chapter 3). In many cases the paper contract is archived,
and the software will execute an approximation of the contract’s terms written in
computer code (see Fig. 1).

23
This is quite effective when signing up to use a service (eg video on demand),
but highly challenging when delivering multiple complex services to one user
(eg updating an address in multiple government department databases). This
has resulted in ever more complex data protection and data privacy legislation
to manage the confidentiality and privacy of the individual in an assured way. In
addition, activities like data sharing or agreeing contracts have remained in paper
form, rather than being automated in the wider economy.
Combining the key attributes of a shared ledger (reconciliation through
cryptography, replicated to many institutions, granular access control,

24
and granular transparency and privacy) with smart contracts may create
opportunities to address some of these challenges, by allowing data to either be
replicated or shared under specific conditions. If two users sign a smart contract,
it will then contain logic that operates on the data in all parts of the shared ledger
(see Fig. 2). This could facilitate the automation or removal of manual process
in government and private sector institutions, which may drive efficiencies in
productivity and growth. Note there are other challenges like management
of legacy databases and processes, but the “permissioning” across multiple
systems is where Smart Contracts come into their own.
In an alternative scenario (Fig. 3), User 1 opts in to a smart contract on a shared
ledger to share their address with an institution that possesses a blue key (there
may be many other institutions, with many different keys). But User 2 has opted
out of sharing their address, so the institution only receives a copy of the latest
address from User 1. This may be useful when an individual changes their
address via their local council, because the change could be reflected on their
passport, drivers licence and other key department databases. Services such
as Onename.io use this concept today with social networks, and it could be
extended to all institutions.
Smart contracts are being considered for a wide variety of uses, particularly for
regulatory compliance, product traceability and service management, and also to
defeat counterfeit products and fraud in the following sectors:
• Food
• Financial Services
• Energy
• Pharmaceuticals
• Health
• Aerospace
• Aviation
• Telecommunications
• IT and communications
• Transport
• Utilities
• Agriculture
• Oil and gas
Some of these are discussed later in this chapter, and in Chapters 6 and 7.
In summary, a smart contract is useful when machines, companies or people
want to create a digital agreement, with cryptographic certainty that the
agreement has been honoured in the ledgers, databases or accounts of all
parties to the agreement.

25
A vision for the future
A key role of democratic government is the appropriate distribution of resource
among its citizens, both individual and corporate. This goes beyond the
distribution of monetary resource and includes social intangibles such as
security, democracy, the conditions for the maintenance of the rule of law; and
economic conditions such as the promotion of free markets, keeping inflation
low and steady, protecting the rights of private property, and guaranteeing
contracts. This distribution in turn is based on an agreement between the citizen
and the government on how rules are set (through voting and manifestos).
As that democratic model has developed, the machinery of government (ie the
mechanism by which this distribution takes place) has become larger, more
centralised and, arguably, more remote from the individual citizen.
The collection of (monetary) resource through taxation of various kinds has
become hugely complex and costly, as has its distribution through welfare
support, grants and pensions. This complexity may in part derive from its
centralised nature.
The private sector has started to recognise that this centralised model delivers
poor customer service, is no longer economic and also fails to take into
account the full benefits of e-commerce and digital capability. Governments are
beginning to recognise that citizens’ expectations should be met in similar ways,
with real time, personal and digital services offered for all government services.
Application of shared ledgers and smart contracts offers the opportunity to put
government in the lead in this area, ensuring that the benefits of the technology
are enjoyed by those who need it most, not just those who can best afford them.
This trend is also apparent in the growth of the less-formal ‘sharing economy’,
and in popular, social-media led phenomena such as the Arab spring and the
Occupy movement. These show a shift in how society communicates and
organises itself. To date, however, there has been no successful way to embrace
these in a secure way while continuing to promote free markets and guarantee
contracts. It is often said that the reason we have never shifted democracy online
is because there is no way to be sure who is voting for what without a highly
costly and arguably non-libertarian centralised identity system. Assuming this
is undesirable, the properties of block chain technology (reconciliation through
cryptography, replicated to many institutions, granular access control, and
granular transparency and privacy) could be turned to the benefit of citizens.
In addition, the early involvement of government in the development and
deployment of block chain technology offers an opportunity for reducing the
complexity and cost of government. That would lead to a more personal,
immediate and potentially more democratic basis for governance, with
consequent increases in compliance, cost-efficiency and accountability.

26
Steps towards embracing block chain technology
Shared ledger technology is being actively promoted and developed in key
global economies such as the United States, China, Singapore and Latin
America. The UK has an opportunity to compete in this race by understanding
and supporting the growth of this nascent sector.
The government’s potential involvement in distributed ledger technology can be
seen through three lenses:
• Government: the civil service
• Government: the legislator
• Government: the steward of the economy
Government: the civil service
The civil service has a number of key duties that could be impacted by this
technology, with strong use cases focusing on the nexus of privacy, data
portability and the sensory capabilities of mobile technology (see Chapter 6 for
more detailed case studies).
Government: the legislator
Distributed ledger technology is still young, and likely to see several more cycles
of development. As such, the government’s actions can target three separate
‘horizons’ in the technology development process.
Horizon 1: Supporting an Emerging Ecosystem
There are already a number of digital currency exchanges, ‘wallet’ providers
and other service providers both in the Bitcoin ecosystem and in other shared
ledger systems. Recognising that the technology and businesses will continue to
mature, Horizon 1 activities may include:
• Requiring exchanges to verify the identities of their customers (known as KYC,
or ‘Know Your Customer’ regulation).
• Issuing guidance for the banking sector to demonstrate the difference
between the types of companies in this space: (i) those who transfer value
via block chain systems; (ii) those who provide software to industries that
use block chains; (iii) those who provide block chain-based software to solve
conventional business problems.
• Establish security standards for wallet providers.
• Creating challenges for academia and the start-up ecosystem to look at
specific gaps in the block chain ecosystem, such as: (i) establishing the
appropriate technical architectures; (ii) establishing how the technology
could enhance efforts to improve customer identity verification, tackle money
laundering, and prevent crime; (iii) establishing how the use of multi-signature
wallets can create new government–citizen user experiences and empower
citizens to control and audit their own data held by the government.
• Leveraging partners to sustain a co-ordinated conversation between the
government and industry.

27
Horizon 2: Early Trials and Pilots
Where the government has specific opportunities it may wish to begin
performing local trials of use cases. Particular questions the government may
want to consider are:
• What key utilities could benefit from shared ledger / database technology?
• Where might a trial support policy (eg pension reform, welfare reform)?
• Where can a trial offer the greatest learning opportunity?
Horizon 3: Position the UK as a Leader in the Global Race
Much of the venture capital investment in distributed ledger technology has
to date focused on Bitcoin, and the west coast of the United States. But the
emerging opportunities for this technology lie in other applications.
• The UK should recognise this nuance and create guidance to that effect
through its regulatory bodies (see Chapter 3 for more on governance and
regulation).
• The UK could create a centre of excellence for these technologies and add
this to the global FinTech / UK Trade and Investment agenda.
Government: the steward of the economy
To understand how the government can best promote and realise the benefit
of this technology, it will be helpful to look at use cases in two different areas:
financial services; and insurance and other industries.
Financial Services
Examples of where the technology could be applied to the finance sector
include:
• Increased efficiency in capital markets
• Reduced fraud and increased efficiency in trade finance
1. Increased efficiency in capital markets
Capital markets still rely on paper records to reconcile a trade between
counterparties. While central utilities have been created in the past, the ability
to reconcile (‘clear’) a transaction and be sure that the counterparty has agreed
is significant because today it requires reliance. Many of the fines and much of
the fixed cost base of banking is based on the concept of reliance. In essence,
one bank must rely on the processes of another bank and has no way to verify
the behaviour of that bank. A block chain technology can help by showing
the chain of transactions (reconciliation through cryptography), and the actors
involved, in a way that is transparent to a regulator. In addition, auditing this data
is expensive and happens after the trade has taken place. The large banks are
now finding appropriate vehicles to collaborate on this technology to unlock
efficiencies.
2. Reduced fraud and increased efficiency in trade finance
Trade finance still operates in much the same way as it has for thousands of
years. There are often at least 5 or 6 parties involved in the buying or selling
of a particular item (eg the buyer, the buyer’s bank, the shipping company,

28
the courier, the seller and the seller’s bank). There have been attempts to both
standardise and create central utilities in trade finance. Shared ledgers offer
some unique advantages.
• A ‘partially permissioned’ system could enable the secure signing of a paper
document (eg a bill of lading stating which products were in a container, how
many, what colour etc). This could then be signed (provably and digitally) by
each of the parties. (Key properties: High Transparency; Reconciliation
Through Cryptography)
• Rather than simply storing the documents, as is done today, a shared ledger
system would record proof of the state of those documents. If adopted more
widely, the documents could be distributed via the shared ledger, rather than
printed and signed. (Key properties: Highly Scalable and Replicable)
Industry and Institutions
1. Asset tracking and provenance assurance
Many items, such as fine art or consumer electronics, physically carry digital
markers. There is, however, no global utility to track and trace these items that
would offer control of the permissions that determine who can see which assets
are being managed. Many organisations rely on paper documents to prove the
origins of produce. But there is no way to verify these origins if the paper trail
is forged. If parts of that supply chain used a shared ledger, and ‘signed’ the
ledger digitally, it would be clear to all parties that the documents had not been
amended or forged in any way.
For example, Provenance.org is a start-up using block chain technology to give
retailers confidence in the provenance and sustainability of garments. Retailers
currently rely on paper documents to confirm the provenance of garments, but
there is no way to ensure that the right person completed those documents,
at the right time. Using block chain technology, the appropriate person could
digitally sign a contract with their private key, giving a far higher confidence that
the right person signed the document at an exact date and time. The nature of
block chain technology means that this would be visible to all retailers who had
the appropriate privileges.
2. Confidential Use of Data with User Control
Data accuracy and confidential data sharing are key challenges for institutions.
Insurance companies can create more accurate products, prices and premiums
if they have additional data that is validated as accurate by one or more trusted
sources (eg governments or banks). The difficulty has been to do this in a secure
way while ensuring that the citizen remains in control of their data.
A block chain would provide proof of how every piece of data was accessed,
perhaps using a solution such as Guardtime. Using trusted execution
environments (TEEs) in mobile phones, such as ARM’s TrustZone chip, any
request to access data held in government would be recorded in a block chain.
Unless the citizen had granted permission to the insurance company, this data
would not move. If any attempt to change or access the data is made, the citizen
or relevant authorities would be made aware immediately.

29
Shared ledger technology, when combined with simple mobile user interfaces,
potentially moves a lot of the complexity of managing security into the
background. The institutions that choose to adopt this way forward will need
to win the confidence of the public, and early trials and implementations will be
helpful in achieving this.
3. Industrial Equipment (a linked ‘Internet of Things’)
It can be difficult to gather accurate, real-time data about industrial equipment
across many sectors, including transport, utilities and agriculture. With the
advent of the Internet of Things (IoT), some of these difficulties are being
addressed with low-cost commodity hardware, but this is potentially vulnerable
to attack. According to a recent report2
from the IBM Institute for Business
Value:
“The result: a proliferation of hundreds of billions of devices that will be no
more expensive than their dumb counterparts, yet able to operate and act as
part of complex, integrated systems.”
“In a network of the scale of the IoT, trust can be very hard to engineer and
expensive, if not impossible, to guarantee. For widespread adoption of the
ever-expanding IoT, however, privacy and anonymity must be integrated into
its design by giving users control of their own privacy. Current security models
based on closed source approaches (often described as “security through
obscurity”) are obsolete and must be replaced by a newer approach – security
through transparency.”
“In our vision of a decentralized IoT, the blockchain is the framework
facilitating transaction processing and coordination among interacting
devices. Each manages its own roles and behavior, resulting in an “Internet
of Decentralized, Autonomous Things” – and thus the democratization of the
digital world”
If each device functions both as an autonomous agent, and a part of the whole,
there is no central point of failure. In this use case, institutions would apply
IoT devices and gain many of the benefits associated with real time data and
connectivity outlined in the recent Government Office for Science report on
the IoT3
. Shared ledger and block chain technology provide new business and
technology models for higher security implementation of IoT.
Example 1: A tractor that operates as an autonomous unit can authorise access
to multiple farmers in an area, enabling a pay per use model. It has the ability to
discover and pay for climate data, and communicate with its manufacturer for
maintenance and repairs.
Example 2: Industrial equipment can be empowered to order new parts, as
long as there is certainty that that device is genuine and has the authority to
do so. This may also lead to new ways of financing such equipment, and new
marketplaces based on the equipment’s performance or efficiency.

30
Conclusion
It is possible to envision a future where this technology creates a form of ‘glass
government’ that is more accountable to the citizen. There are a number of use
cases, and as the technology progresses it is almost certain more will emerge.
This may help to achieve policy objectives. The key points for ministers and the
civil service are:
The technology is in its early stages but shows significant promise. To unlock
the promise of block chain technology, it is essential to understand how the
combination of:
• Reconciliation through cryptography
• Large scale, secure replication of data
• Provable Transparency
can be used over three horizons:
• Supporting the emerging ecosystem
• Early trials and pilots
• Positioning the UK as a global leader

32
CHAPTER 2
Technology
Physical cash is unlike any other form of money. It
can be transferred between two people without the
involvement or permission of any third parties such
as banks or governments. Bitcoin and its block chain
have shown us how to perform this trick electronically.
But the implications and opportunities of this digital
technology are much broader.
Author
Richard G Brown,
Chief Technology Officer, R3

33
Chapter 2:Technology
Introduction
Bitcoin is a new form of digital cash. Rather than being issued by a central
bank, such as the Bank of England, its issuance is controlled by a decentralised
network of computers. This network relies on cryptography and other techniques
to regulate the supply of Bitcoins and keep track of who owns them. Bitcoin is
consequently known as a cryptocurrency.
Banks keep track of customer balances on a ledger. Bitcoin also uses a ledger,
but it is maintained collaboratively by the decentralised network of computers,
and is known as a distributed ledger.
As new batches of entries are added to the distributed ledger, they include
a reference back to the previous batch, so that all participants can verify for
themselves the true provenance of everything on the ledger. These batches are
called blocks, and the whole collection is a block chain.
This chapter will explain more about these concepts, why they are important,
and how they might form the basis of a much broader suite of applications.
What is money?
A £20 note is an extraordinary thing. Simply handing the note to someone
instantly transfers £20 of value to them, without requiring a third party to verify
the transaction. If the two people were alone, nobody else in the entire world
need know it had happened, and nobody could have stopped the transfer.
But this peer-to-peer transfer only works at close distance. To transfer £20 of
value to somebody in a different town or country, we need to trust other people
and cede some degree of control to them: the postal worker who handles an
envelope containing the cash, or the bank that carries out an electronic funds
transfer. Indeed, if the bank believes that the money is connected to illegal
activities, it can block the electronic transaction or seize electronic funds.
The world’s financial plumbing — payments systems, the working relationships
between banks, electronic communication networks such as SWIFT (the
Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) — are a direct
consequence of the fact that physical cash really is fundamentally different to
every other form of money. Only physical cash is a bearer instrument. And only
physical cash can be transferred without someone else’s permission — it is
‘censorship resistant’.
Or so we thought until late 2008, when Bitcoin was announced. Its creator
claimed that it was a system of “purely peer-to-peer electronic cash”, which
could be controlled outright by the holder, and sent to anybody without needing
a bank’s permission or running the risk of confiscation.
Every full participant in the Bitcoin system has a copy of every transaction,
arranged in ‘blocks’, going all the way back to the start of the system. Each
block is cryptographically linked to the previous block, forming a block chain
that maintains a full history of transactions, and therefore acts as a distributed
ledger. Users can access the ledger with a variety of different applications (such

34
as Coinbase or Blockchain — not to be confused with the underlying technical
concept), and every copy of the ledger is synchronised by algorithms set up to
reach ‘consensus’ about the state of the ledger.
Bitcoin did not appear out of nowhere in 2008. Research into digital currency
systems goes back decades, and each of the components of the system
already existed. Bitcoin’s breakthrough was to combine existing techniques
in an innovative way, and to do so at a time when the idea of open source
development on the internet was mature, and when people were receptive to the
idea of alternative monetary systems.
The system is designed so that it becomes progressively harder — effectively
impossible — for older blocks to be rewritten. Once a transaction is sufficiently
confirmed, it can never be reversed, rendering it censorship resistant. In short, it
truly is digital cash.
Little wonder, then, that governments
and regulators around the world have
viewed this invention with such caution. A
censorship resistant, digital bearer asset
would seem to be an ideal currency for
criminal networks, and Bitcoin became the
primary monetary unit of Silk Road, the
now-defunct digital black market.
Yet most regulators, including multiple
agencies in the UK, have chosen not
to ban Bitcoin, and many legitimate
companies are investing heavily in this
form of technology. Why?
What is ‘the block chain’?
A block is simply a list of payments. A block
chain is a list of blocks, each one referring back
to the one that went before. However, when
people talk about the block chain, they tend
to mean the collection of technologies and
techniques that underpin the Bitcoin system,
which other projects have used as inspiration
because they solve unrelated problems in
finance and elsewhere.
FAQ
Opportunity or threat?
Firstly, these systems are not as uncontrollable — or ‘unpermissioned’ — as one
might expect. Contrary to public perception, the underlying architecture makes
it relatively easy to track transactions and establish the identity of people who
misuse the system. Regulators have also learned how to control the ‘on-ramps’
and ‘off-ramps’ where value flows in and out of the system.
Platforms like Bitcoin may sound alarming at first, but users are not guaranteed
anonymity and if they want to convert their bitcoins into pounds, dollars or
euros then the exchange systems are expected to enforce relevant regulations
regarding identity, money laundering and terrorist financing. Furthermore, and
as will be argued shortly, many of the most interesting applications of this
technology enforce rules about who is and is not allowed to use the system.
The second emerging belief is that the technology underpinning Bitcoin could
have valuable and benign uses, and could enable significant future innovation.
Bitcoin’s censorship resistance is problematic from a law-enforcement and
regulation perspective, and it is therefore unlikely that major corporates or banks
will engage closely with Bitcoin or related technologies in the short to medium
term.
But the distributed ledger technology behind cryptocurrencies offers an

35
openness that could be immensely valuable. Open platforms, controlled by
no one firm and with a thriving community of developers, have been shown
time and again to be drivers of innovation. They can enable outsiders and new
entrants to offer new products and services for previously marginalised users
(see Chapter 5 for more on the technology’s disruptive potential).
Although distributed ledger technology
was invented to satisfy one goal (digital
cash), firms and other institutions are
now actively exploring how it can be
applied to a variety of other pressing
problems. For example, businesses often
find ‘permissioned’ block chains far more
appealing than Bitcoin’s unpermissioned
model, because specific parties are
authorised to verify transactions. This
allows the businesses to create secured,
private networks involving mutually
trusting firms and individuals (for a more
extensive discussion of permissioned and
unpermissioned systems, see Chapter 3).
Overall, it is clear that there could be a
continuum of technologies in this space, which can be categorised by how
‘decentralised’ they are (ie to what extent are they truly permissionless) (see
Fig. 1). But centralisation is just one dimension along which this domain can be
analysed. Other categories under active exploration include the degree to which
use of funds can be prescribed (eg funds that can only be spent by a child if a
parent co-signs) and the possibility of representing assets other than money (eg
securities or even title to property).
FAQ: What fundamentally differentiates
Bitcoin from previous currencies?
Bitcoins can be owned by any individual,
without permission from any bank or
government. They can be sent to anybody
else in the world who knows how to operate a
‘Bitcoin wallet’. It is this principle of ‘censorship
resistance’ that captures Bitcoin’s essential
breakthrough — and which explains early
concerns by lawmakers and regulators.
FAQ

36
Potential applications
Distributed ledger technology could solve business problems that can be
summed up as cost, duplication and reconciliation.
Take banking. Every bank has built or bought at least one (usually several)
systems to track and manage the lifecycles of their financial transactions. Each
of these systems cost money to build and even more to maintain. They must be
connected to each other and synchronised, usually through a process known
as reconciliation. This involves teams of people in each bank checking with their
counterparts in other banks to make sure everything matches, and to deal with
the problems when it does not.
A common solution involves setting up a single, centralised ledger shared by all
participants. The UK has had a number of successes that rely on this approach,
especially in the Faster Payments Service. But centralised utilities are typically
expensive and, as their data and processing is centralised, they often must be
integrated with each participant’s own systems. Alternatively, many decentralised
databases can sit around the edges of a network while messages move between
them (see Fig. 2).
Bitcoin, in contrast, synchronises thousands of computers in a distributed
network via the internet: if my computer thinks that I own a Bitcoin, then so
does every other computer in the network. If a similar technique could be used
in banking, all the banks’ systems could stay in step with each other without
requiring armies of people to reconcile and resolve the issues. Crucially, we
do not need Bitcoin to achieve this — it is the underlying distributed ledger
technology that offers a possible solution.
This could help to tackle one of the biggest problems with financial services: the
costs of using paper. In recent years, there have been many different initiatives
intended to remove paper documents from the economy. However, in many
cases the new technology has simply recreated old processes in a new way, or
continues to rely on paper in other stages of the process. For example, providing
finance to exporters remains an extremely manual process: an importer’s bank
often issues a letter of credit, against which the exporter’s bank will advance
funds. Although this process is usually electronic, the subsequent verifications
rely on bundles of paper documents that are manually processed around the
world. A shared ledger technology could, in contrast, replace certain aspects of
paper-based banking with processes that operate in a much speedier and paper-

37
CASE STUDY
Research and horizon scanning
John G Baird, Lead for the RCUK Digital Economy Theme, EPSRC
The Engineering and Physical Sciences
Research Council (EPSRC) leads the Digital
Economy (DE) Theme on behalf of Research
Councils UK (RCUK). Since 2008, the DE
Theme has invested over £170 million in applied
multidisciplinary research, with a particular focus
on societal challenges around the digitisation of
the economy and its effects on social inclusion,
rural economy, personal data, security, identity,
trustworthiness and privacy. The DE Theme
is leading on taking forward both the Digital
Currencies and the Internet of Things activities
announced in the March 2015 Budget. In the
area of distributed ledger technologies, to date
we have invested in the following activities:
1. Cryptocurrency Effects in Digital
Transformations (CREDIT)1
, an 18-month £0.4
million research project that aims to investigate
the phenomena of cryptocurrencies and their
associated underlying technology, the block
chain, grouped around 4 main themes: digital
transformations, privacy, community and
institutions. The main outcomes of the research
will be:
• A step-by-step guide aimed at helping start-
ups and incumbents understand the issues
to consider for incorporating block chain
technologies into their products and services
• A number of small pilot studies with
companies examining the potential impacts
of cryptocurrencies
• A community of academic researchers and
professionals able to further develop this
nascent research area
2. CREDIT builds on two previous scoping
reviews that we supported: ‘The disruptive role
of crypto-currencies’2
and ‘ICT and the Future
of Financial Services’3
. These both reviewed the
current understanding of cryptocurrencies and
revealed gaps in the understanding of social,
ethical, legal, regulatory impacts of crypto-
currencies. As a result, we recently issued a
£10 million call for research proposals on ‘Trust,
Identity, Privacy and Security in the Digital
Economy’4
, which features “Broad applications
of distributed ledger technologies” as one of
its six focal areas. This focal area seeks to
support research that blends and balances
the technological advancement in distributed
ledger systems with an understanding of the
societal, ethical, legal and business frameworks
needed to build confidence, trust and adoption
of such systems by individuals, communities,
organisations and states. Ultimately, we hope
this research will pave the way towards a ‘smart’
economy that can support diverse scenarios of
monetary and non-monetary value exchange
between individuals and organisations and, in
the future, ‘smart’ objects.
3. Finally, we have also funded a £260,000
research project, 3rd Party Dematerialisation and
Rematerialisation of Capital (3DaRoC)5
, which
explored how to design effective digital retail
financial services based on case studies with
two retail finance organisations: Zopa Limited,
a peer-to-peer lender; and the Bristol Pound, a
community currency. The project has produced
an online toolkit to assist users and businesses
interested in the key issues impacting the design
and use of digital financial products6
.
less way. The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is
already supporting exploratory research on such financial applications (see case
study on research and horizon scanning, above).
But the opportunities are not limited to banking. Applications are being
explored in healthcare (patient records), government (land registries and benefit
disbursement— see Chapter 6), electronics (including the ‘Internet of Things’ —

38
see Chapter 1) and even the world of art and jewellery (tracking the provenance
of diamonds — see Chapter 5).
It is important to stress that these technologies are very early in their
development, and there are many unsolved problems to tackle before these
applications can be realised, including issues of privacy, performance, and
scalability. Does the technology actually work well enough for the banks to trust?
Who will build these platforms if they can’t easily charge a fee when they are
shared and mutualised?
But the field is developing rapidly and many of the problems are already being
resolved. It is now becoming possible to distinguish between those aspects
of the technology that will change over time, and those that are innate and
are unlikely to change. Already, we can see that distributed ledger technology
could enable firms and governments to run more efficiently, without expensive
reconciliation and duplication. And it could allow both incumbents and new
entrants to compete on equal terms in offering new products and services to
consumers based on open access to securely shared data.
That could usher in a world-changing revolution that goes far beyond
censorship-resistant digital cash.

40
CHAPTER 3
Governance
andRegulation
Both the legal and the digital spheres are governed
by rules, but the nature of these rules is different.
In a digital environment, both laws (legal code) and
software/hardware (technical code) regulate activity.
The impact of both must be considered in setting out
regulations that cover distributed ledger systems.
Author
Vili Lehdonvirta, Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford;
Robleh Ali, Manager – Digital Currencies, Bank of England

41
Chapter 3: Governance and Regulation
Introduction
This chapter deals with rules and rulemaking in distributed ledger systems.
We will distinguish between legal code (rules consisting of legal obligations)
and technical code (software and protocols). We will also distinguish between
governance (rule-making by the owners or participants of a system with the
purpose of safeguarding their private interests) and regulation (rule-making by
an outside authority tasked with representing the interests of the public).
Legal code vs technical code: Two types of rules
The financial system is both a set of legal obligations between institutions and a
set of digital records of these obligations. Both the legal and the digital spheres
are governed by rules, but the nature of these rules is different. In a seminal text
on the subject1
, Lawrence Lessig of Harvard University addressed how these
legal and digital rules interact to govern activity. Lessig argued that in a digital
environment both laws (legal code) and software/hardware (computer code)
regulate activity, and that the impact of both needs to be considered when
constructing a theory of regulation. In this chapter we refer to technical code
rather than computer code. This definition covers both software and protocols,
as distributed ledgers rely on both to function.
One fundamental difference between legal code and technical code is the
mechanism by which each influences activity. Legal code is ‘extrinsic’: the rules
can be broken, but consequences flow from that breach to ensure compliance.
Technical code, in contrast, is ‘intrinsic’: if its rules are broken then an error is
returned and no activity occurs, so compliance is ensured through the operation
of the code itself. Another characteristic of software is that a machine will rigidly
follow the rules even where that compliance produces unforeseen or undesirable
outcomes. This leads to some striking differences in the operation of distributed
ledger systems compared with the current financial system.
1. Current financial system: ruling via legal code
The modern financial system is already largely digital and heavily reliant on
technical code. This technical code governs the creation and amendment of the
digital records of the legal obligations between institutions. Financial regulation
is aimed at the effects these legal obligations produce: for example, whether a
bank has sufficient capital or liquidity. The financial system is already governed
by this combination of technical code and legal code, but financial governance
and regulation has traditionally focused on the latter.
Enforcement of the public element of the legal code falls to a specialised group
of financial regulators charged with ensuring compliance by participants in the
system. Participants must provide the information that their regulator needs to
assess whether they are in compliance with the system’s rules. If an institution
is not in compliance then the regulator can take action to bring them back into
line. This is not to say technical code has no influence on the existing regulatory
process — all the information provided to the regulators is digital, and the
product of technical code — but governance and regulatory aims are pursued by
producing legal code rather than by changing the technical code.

42
2. Distributed ledger systems: ruling via technical code
Distributed ledger systems such as Bitcoin have shown that they can function
without legal rules. Instead, the rules that each participant must follow are
defined and enforced only by technical code. Each participant in the network
runs the same or compatible software that defines what kinds of transactions
are permissible. For example, the Bitcoin software allows participants to spend
only balances that they can prove they own with cryptographic keys. The Bitcoin
software also regulates how new currency is issued, and places an absolute cap
on the size of the money pool. There are no bylaws or other legal documents
stating these rules, and no humans to enforce them — distributed ledger
systems are solely governed by their own technical code.
To prevent participants from modifying their copy of the code to issue
transactions that are against the rules, each transaction needs to be verified
before it enters the ledger. In an ‘unpermissioned’ distributed ledger system
like Bitcoin, verifiers (known as miners) are chosen by lottery. The system seeks
to assure their integrity through a system of economic incentives, in a process
governed by the software. In a ‘permissioned’ distributed ledger system, verifiers
are appointed by the system’s proprietor, and their integrity is assured through
conventional means, such as a legal contract.
In summary, distributed ledger systems differ from the conventional financial
system in that they are ruled by technical code rather than legal code. One
advantage of this is that compliance costs are low: participants need only
use a compliant software package to issue transactions. It might seem that
enforcement costs are lower, too, but this is not necessarily the case because
the mining system that is used to verify transactions in all of the most popular
distributed ledger systems consumes significant computational resources. That
cost must eventually be borne by the system’s users.
Governance vs regulation: Two types of rule-making
Because the current financial system and distributed ledgers are primarily governed
by different types of rules, we must therefore ask the question: who makes the rules?
1. Current financial system: a mesh of private and public rule-making
There are many places where legal code is being produced in the current financial
system, but these can be broadly divided into two categories: private rule-making
(governance) and public rule-making (regulation). An example of private rule-
making is the Visa Core Rules promulgated by the financial services company Visa
Inc. to govern the actions of all the participants in the Visa system. Such private
rule-making is done by proprietors of private financial networks like Visa, as well as
by private associations of financial institutions wishing to coordinate their activities
to one another’s benefit. An example of public rule-making is the statutory
oversight of Visa Europe’s payment system by the Bank of England.
The design of the public legal code in the current financial system is the province
of policymakers who have to consider the effect of regulations on the different
institutions of the financial system (a ‘microprudential’ approach) as well as the
impact on the system as a whole (a ‘macroprudential’ approach). As the financial
system is global, international bodies such as the Basel Committee on Banking
Supervision convene policymakers from around the world to reach voluntary

43
accords that can then be translated into legislation in a specific jurisdiction.
2. Distributed ledger systems: ad hoc private rule-making
Unpermissioned distributed ledger systems are sometimes thought to exist
independently of human rule-making, and governed only by mathematical
algorithms. This is a misconception. Just like legal code, technical code needs to be
produced and maintained by humans who define the rules that the code embodies.
Using Bitcoin as an example, the initial version of the software was published
by Satoshi Nakamoto (a pseudonym). In 2010, Nakamoto handed control of the
project to Gavin Andresen, an Australian-born programmer living in the United
States. Like any software, Bitcoin needs to be regularly updated to address bugs,
security issues, and changes in the operating environment. Such an update can in
principle change any aspect of the software, including accounting and ownership
rules. Who gets to write the software and how that process is governed is therefore
critically important to all participants in a distributed ledger system.
In the case of Bitcoin, the software is governed by an ad hoc process involving
a handful of informal institutions and power holders. Figure 1 shows who has
written most of the current Bitcoin code. The software is open source and anyone
can suggest changes to it, but technical authority to admit changes to the official
version of the software is held by a team of five core developers appointed by
Andresen. The core developers’ power is constrained by an informal self-imposed
charter, which states that significant changes to the rules require broad consensus
from the community. Any update to the software must furthermore be installed
by a majority of the miners (as measured by the computer processing power they
contribute) for the changes to become effective. A handful of individuals who
manage so-called mining pools are therefore very influential in determining whether
or not miners ratify a software update in this way.
This governance process worked well when the changes to the code were
uncontroversial bug fixes, but it has started to show signs of breaking down
recently, because some decisions require choosing which stakeholders’ interests
to prioritise over others’. Andresen and others have stated that the process
needs to become more formal. The community is debating what such a formal
governance system should look like, but this is complicated by the fact that

44
Bitcoin was founded on an ethos of anti-institutionalism. This is an interesting
conundrum, as it demonstrates the worth of legal code and shows that technical
code alone does not produce an optimal outcome.
In permissioned distributed ledger systems, governance of the software is
made simpler by the fact that there is usually a proprietor with clear legal and
technical authority over the code. It is up to the proprietor to determine how the
code is modified, and up to the users (often customers of the service) to decide
whether they are comfortable with having the proprietor exercise authority over
the software. Service level contracts and other conventional means can be used
to establish responsibilities and enforce them. Permissioned distributed ledger
systems are in this respect not very different from conventional private financial
networks like Visa or software-as-a-service (SaaS) systems.
How should we regulate distributed ledger systems?
Governance in a distributed ledger system as described above is concerned
with the system’s stakeholders’ interests, but there may also be broader social
interests involved in how a distributed ledger functions. For example, regulators
may wish to collect taxes, prosecute crimes, and limit the use of a distributed
ledger for criminal purposes. If a system is adopted to the extent that it starts to
have potential knock-on effects elsewhere in society, regulators may also wish to
ensure that the system is resilient against systemic risks and market failure. This
regulation can be applied through legal code or technical code.
1. Regulating distributed ledgers via legal code
Regulating a permissioned distributed ledger system is simply a matter of
imposing legal obligations on its proprietor. Regulating an unpermissioned
system like Bitcoin via legal code is more complicated, as there is no single legal
entity in control of the system. It would be difficult to regulate what software
people are allowed to install on their computers. Attempts to regulate Bitcoin
via legal code have instead focused on regulating the businesses that deal with
Bitcoin, such as exchanges and wallet providers. These businesses can be
regulated in their own right (eg to prevent a wallet provider from disappearing
with customers’ money) or as a means to indirectly regulate what the ledger is
used for (eg ensuring compliance with anti-money laundering regulations).
A well-known example of regulating Bitcoin via legal code is the BitLicense,
issued by the New York State Department of Financial Services to businesses
offering digital currency services to New York residents2
. The deadline for
businesses to obtain the license was 8 August 2015, and unlicensed service
providers can be penalised.
2. Regulating distributed ledgers via technical code
The technical code for distributed ledger systems like Bitcoin is currently
produced by private actors in an ad hoc process. But technical code, comprising
software and protocols, can also emerge from the public sector. For example,
TCP/IP and some other core internet protocols were the result of government-
funded research projects and are now maintained under the auspices of
the Internet Society, an international non-profit organisation with an open
membership structure based on geographic location and special interests. Other
parts of internet infrastructure are maintained by international multi-stakeholder
processes, and some parts remain under the oversight of US public regulators.

45
While this patchwork is far from a perfect solution, it points to the possibility of
public involvement and democratic representation in the production of technical
code — public regulation via technical code as opposed to legal code.
Table 1
Examples of
privately and
publicly produced
legal code and
computer code
Legal code Protocol
Privately
produced
Visa Core Rules
Faster Payment
Service Rules
Financial Information
eXchange (FIX) protocol
Bitcoin
Publicly
produced
European Market
Infrastructure Regulation
BitLicense
Internet (TCP/IP)
World Wide Web (HTTP)
Applied to distributed ledger systems, this could mean anything from instituting
formal multi-stakeholder processes for maintaining the technical code, to
developing public standards for the code. If this allowed governments or the
public directly to attain legitimate regulatory goals by influencing the rules built
into the computer code, it could lessen the need for a body of new legal code to
regulate these systems.
Alternatively, the public sector could develop a permissioned system that allows
public regulatory influence to be exerted through a combination of legal and
technical code, rather than exclusively through legal code as at present. Some
of the core internet technologies have shown that it is possible for governments
to successfully catalyse the creation of technical code that has become
foundational to private sector activity.
Conclusions
In contrast to conventional private financial networks like Visa, unpermissioned
distributed ledger systems like Bitcoin lack a central legal entity with formal
responsibility over the system. Instead, they are governed by ad hoc processes,
usually centring on a handful of software developers who produce the system’s
software code. If these systems are to grow in value and influence, they will most
likely need to develop more robust internal governance processes. The lack
of a central legal entity also makes it more challenging for public regulators to
regulate distributed ledger systems via legal code. Governments should therefore
also consider ways of regulating distributed ledger systems by influencing the
technical code that defines their rules. In finding the right blend, the government
should consider the strengths and weaknesses of both technical code and legal
code, recognising that the two interact and should be designed accordingly.
The emergence of Bitcoin and distributed ledger systems has brought the issue
of technical code to the fore in the context of the current financial system as well.
Distributed ledgers show that financial systems can be governed and regulated
with technical code as well as legal code. Policymakers should recognise the
influence of technical code on the financial system and consider how such
influence could be made part of the regulatory system, with potential benefits
such as lower compliance costs.

46
Securit
CHAPTER 4
y
andPrivacyThere are many different types of
distributed ledger systems, each
offering various opportunities and
threats regarding security and privacy.
It is important to analyse the business
and security requirements of any
proposed implementation before
deciding which type of ledger to use.
Author
M. Angela Sasse, University College London, with contributions from: George Danezis
and Sarah Meiklejohn, UCL; Daniel Shiu, Government Communications Headquarters;
Phil Godsiff, University of Surrey

47
Chapter 4: Security and Privacy
Introduction
Security can be simply defined as: “Things that should happen, do; and things
that shouldn’t happen, don’t.” For any particular implementation of distributed
ledger and block chain technology, the risks of desired and undesired outcomes
depend on how the technology is designed, implemented and governed.
Different stakeholders will face different risks.
Threats to the systems include not only attacks by external entities, but also
actions by internal stakeholders and failure of components (such as software).
Prior to any implementation, detailed threat models need to be developed, and
specific security requirements identified, to deliver the outcomes.
Effective security provides a necessary but not sufficient foundation to deliver
privacy for individual and organisational stakeholders. We must also consider
how the information disclosed in a particular implementation might be combined
with other available information to identify individuals or groups, or detect their
activities.
Innovation advantages
One of the main security features of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies is the
decentralised control over the network. The system is governed by a global set
of peers who operate based on consensus (see Definitions, p17), so there is no
central point of trust or failure. This means that any malicious actor must put in
considerable effort to attack the system. For individual users, the system can
also achieve a high degree of security — in order to move the bitcoins held in a
wallet, an attacker must know the private key associated with a given public key
(which is where the bitcoins are held). Thus, the attacker must be able to subvert
the security of an established cryptographic standard (the Elliptic Curve Digital
Signature Algorithm, ECDSA) in order to steal someone’s bitcoins.
Bitcoin and associated ‘altcoins’ apply a much broader computer security
infrastructure — namely distributed ledgers — that provides high-integrity and
view consistency. Such ledgers use cryptographic techniques to ensure that
anyone can check if a particular record is within the ledger, as long as they
possess a small amount of crucial information. At the same time, complex
consensus protocols are employed to ensure that everyone in the system gets
a consistent view of the ledger. This is key to Bitcoin’s ability to prevent double
spending, but it could be equally important when using distributed ledgers for
other applications, such as recording contracts or deeds. Distributed ledgers
naturally lend themselves to implementing high-level services that involve
notaries, time-stamping, and high-integrity archiving, and promise to lower the
costs of these activities by increasing automation, enabling easy switching of
service providers, and peer transactions.
One of the main problems for secure on-line communications lies in establishing
that a public key belongs to a service that a user wishes to access. The prevalent
mechanism used since the 1990s is known as a Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) —
essentially a set of trusted third parties that provide certificates attesting the link
between keys and services. But these certificate authorities have been to shown

48
to be fallible; when compromised, they may issue invalid certificates unnoticed.
The Certificate Transparency1
(CT) system (recently initiated by Google, and now
overseen by a working group) uses distributed ledger technology to mitigate
this problem. All certificates are appended to a distributed ledger, and any user
or services can check that the certificate they are about to use is the one in the
ledger. Consequently, rogue certificates can be detected quickly — a significant
disincentive to attackers seeking to compromise and abuse the PKI system.
The problem of establishing authoritative bindings between keys and entities
also exists when users want to protect personal communications. But current
solutions (such as the PGP Web of Trust, or centralised solutions) are either
unusable or have brittle security properties. One promising alternative is
CONIKS2
, which relies on a specially crafted distributed ledger to store and
retrieve user public keys that can be used to encrypt or sign emails. Unlike CT
— which relies on a network of third parties to maintain and audit the distributed
ledger — CONIKS uses communication providers and their existing databases of
users to build a high-integrity ledger.
Security challenges
The security advantages of the decentralised systems identified above
— specifically, resilience and robustness — only apply completely to
unpermissioned ledgers that subscribe to a global trust theory. For permissioned
ledgers, or examples with other centralised functions, there will be less resilience
and robustness, but a better ability to assure central trust and/or functions.
In fact, there is a broad spectrum of options (see Chapter 2) between totally
decentralised systems (as in Bitcoin) and totally permissioned system (a private,
dedicated network). An example of a middle-ground solution that uses the
strength of both is the proposal from George Danezis and Sarah Meiklejohn of
University College London for centrally-banked cryptocurrencies3
— relying on a
centrally-controlled server to establish the block chain while using a distributed
network of ‘mintettes’ to absorb transactions.
Given this spectrum of solutions, it is important to analyse the business and
security requirements of any proposed implementation before deciding which
type of ledger to use.
For example, the key priorities of a system to manage welfare support payments
for the Department for Work and Pensions would include ensuring both the
availability of the service and its resilience against network disruption (see
Chapter 6). The greatest threats would probably come from opportunistic cyber-
criminals targeting individual users for monetary gain. Therefore:
• The system should be designed to require minimum knowledge and effort
from individual users ie there should only be a small number of choices and
configurations, with clear feedback of consequences
• If commodity devices such as smartphones are used, ensure that credentials
and keys are securely accessed and not visible to other applications
• The ledger itself should be maintained across a wide network of servers to
allow for resilience against network outages

49
• For wider deployments, the payment authorisation service should be
centralised on dedicated hardware and hardened against attack
Alternatively, a system that might be used for distributing foreign aid would need
to ensure the integrity of transactions (to avoid funds being syphoned off for
other purposes); and maintain the availability of the system during disaster relief
situations, for example. Threats may come from nation states that could gain
geopolitical advantage from disrupting transactions, or from dishonest agents
within the states receiving aid. Therefore:
• The system should run on a small, hardened and dedicated network of servers
that establish government copies of the ledger with offline back-ups
• Clients should be encouraged to set up their own networks of ledgers, with
advice on secure design that allows regular updates or corrections from the
government servers
• Allow the system to be taken offline if a serious network attack is suspected
Arguably, though, the most serious threat to any government-backed system
is obsolescence. If it is too difficult to use, or does not offer the functionality
required, it will not be adopted.
Another threat that has recently emerged is that of a system being hijacked
because a different software implementation creates a ‘split’ within an existing
system. Cryptanalysis researcher Nicolas Courtois at UCL, who has followed
Bitcoin closely, reported in August 2015 that:
“There will be a possibility to mine blocks with a new version number and new
rules. This is meant to make bitcoin more democratic: larger blocks, more
transactions per second, lower fees, wider adoption. Current bitcoin has reached
its capacity limits (not much more than 3 transactions per second) in the recent
months and bitcoin developer community has FAILED to solve this problem.”
This shows that the governance of any government-backed implementation
will require serious forethought of possible technical developments, and how to
protect it from takeover by other entities — hostile or not.
Security recommendations
For each particular use of the technology, the government should carefully
identify the relevant threats. Although no nation state actor is interested in
disrupting Bitcoin, they might be interested in attacking a UK national digital
currency — and if there is any financial gain to be made from fraudulent ledger
entries, it is likely that organised crime will target users with low security
awareness.
Given the threats identified, the government should decide on an appropriate
level of security for the threat actor, and the lifetime of the proposed usage.
If cyberattacks are anticipated then systems should be designed with secure
usability in mind from the outset. For example, unpermissioned networks of
ledgers allow actors to threaten network integrity either by adding their own
servers or operating a denial-of-service attack on legitimate servers; to counter
this, a long-term ledger of interest to nation states might need quantum resistant
signature schemes.

50
It is easier to build a new secure infrastructure than to adapt existing
infrastructure to a new secure application. As such, a dedicated new set of
permissioned servers would be easier to configure and accredit than reusing
existing internet servers. Advice on building secure systems should be sought
either from the UK Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) or
reputable industry providers.
For systems intended to have a long lifetime, the initial design should make
it straightforward to update components during that lifetime (eg the ability to
switch out nodes of the network with more modern hardware; the ability to
upgrade cryptographic algorithms that can no longer be used securely).
In any trial of the technology, it is also important to fund penetration testing of the
experiment at both the system and user levels. Real-world attackers would not
be interested in a small scale proof-of-concept, but could become a threat when
an application is deployed at scale.
Privacy challenges
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency was designed from the outset to provide a form
of pseudonymity5
(its designer Satoshi Nakamoto referred to this property as
“anonymity”, but this is a misnomer).
Users can create a number of wallets to hold bitcoins, and there is no restriction
on the number of wallets they can own, nor any ‘Know Your Customer’
requirements to open a wallet. Coins are transferred from one wallet to another,
and the obscured relationship between wallets and real-world persons provides
a degree of privacy.
The decision to allow pseudonymous identities, and to not link wallets to any
real-world identifiers, is a pragmatic one for Bitcoin that has contributed to its
wide adoption. Most jurisdictions do not have any strong way of linking real-
world identities to online transactions, and thus a reliance on the existence
of such mechanism would have prevented the deployment of Bitcoin at the
time, and even today. Furthermore, given the international nature of the Bitcoin
network, it is unclear which jurisdiction would have been entrusted with certifying
identity information, and how one could establish whether a legal jurisdiction is
entitled to identify a certain user.
Finally, requiring identification as part of opening wallets potentially has an
impact on the fungibility of bitcoin as a currency: if an identity provider has to
be involved to authorise transactions then they may be able to block them,
selectively denying the value stored in some user’s bitcoins. Other parties could
not be sure that value stored in bitcoins would be unconditionally available in
the future. Thus Bitcoin pseudonymity allowed both rapid adoption (by avoiding
dependencies on non-existent or fragmented identity infrastructures), and
also preserves important aspects of Bitcoin as a currency (ie its status as an
unconditional store of value).
This pseudonymous relation between users and wallets is, however, not full
or perfect anonymity. Chains of transactions in and out of wallets, and from
wallet to wallet, are visible to all, and can be traced and tracked in public. UCL’s
Sarah Meiklejohn and colleagues have shown that chains of transactions may
be traced throughout the Bitcoin block chain to link, for examples, instances of

51
bitcoin theft with specific attempts to withdraw bitcoins through exchanges6
.
This approach could be used to enforce some Know Your Customer rules,
because once a particular wallet address is identified and linked with a physical
person, it is possible to uncover all of their transactions.
This weak form of pseudonymity, combined with the transparency of
transactions on the bitcoin block chain, actually represents a privacy challenge.
Unlike traditional online payments, which are only visible to transacting parties
and financial institutions, Bitcoin payments — including the wallets involved, the
approximate time of the transaction, and the transaction values — are recorded
in a publicly visible block chain. Anyone can process the block chain and draw
inferences about, for example, the turnover of an on-line merchant, the buying
profile of a particular user, or even the many transfers between private individuals
— a capability that was restricted in the past to financial institutions and law
enforcement.
Privacy recommendations
A number of techniques, and alternative cryptocurrencies, have been proposed
to alleviate the privacy problems of a fully transparent block chain.
The first set of techniques involves ‘mixing’ systems. These take coins from a
number of users, and output coins to different addresses that are not linked
to the original users. By breaking the link between payer wallets and payee
wallets, they provide some measure of anonymity. There are, however, two key
challenges with engineering such systems. Firstly, the anonymity they provide is
not perfect: although a coin may be traced to one of a number of addresses, is
not perfectly hidden amongst all possible wallets in Bitcoin. This partial leakage
of information allows the application of statistical attacks to de-anonymise
repeated transaction through so-called Statistical Disclosure Attacks7
. The extent
to which these attacks are effective is an open question. Secondly, dishonest
mixes have the potential to accept coins but never pay out, effectively stealing
them. A number of bitcoin mix designs (such as Mixcoin8
) attempt to alleviate
this problem through making part of the mix operation transparent enough to
ensure the integrity of its operation, without compromising its privacy.
A second family of systems radically alters the way bitcoin payments are
made, and what is recorded in the block chain, to provide stronger privacy. For
example, Zerocoin9
, Zerocash10
, Pinocchio Coin11
, or certain Sigma protocols12
adapt group signature algorithms to the setting of cryptocurrency transactions.
A payer provides a zero-knowledge proof that they own some coins from a
list, without revealing which, while also leaking enough information to prevent
double spending. This allows them to pay a coin without being fully linked to
previous transactions. As with mixing systems, these techniques may only hide
payees within a limited list of potential users, not all, which opens the way to
de-anonymising multiple transactions. They are, however, robust in terms of
integrity, and do away with mixing as a third party operation that could pose a
performance or trust bottleneck.

52
CHAPTER 5
Disruptive
Potential
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs)
represent a significant challenge to
existing business and governance
models. Technical innovations such as
DLTs can enable revolutionary changes
in those business structures, ultimately
causing major changes in the way in
which the economy and society itself is
organised and governed. Such changes
are more far reaching than normal
innovations in products, services and
operating systems.
Author
Phil Godsiff, Senior Research Fellow, Surrey Centre for the Digital Economy, Surrey
Business School, University of Surrey

53
Chapter 5: Disruptive Potential
Introduction
Technological innovations can have a huge impact on how businesses operate.
New technology can enable businesses to offer new products and services,
capture new revenue streams, introduce lower-cost operations, and streamline
their organisational structures. If existing businesses are slow to adapt, or try
to create barriers to entry, new entrants can take advantage of innovations to
replace these incumbents.
Sufficiently radical technical innovations can lead to revolutionary changes,
not only in business models or industries, but eventually in the way in which
society is organised and governed. For example, the steam engine led to the
development of railways and enabled the movement of the population to urban
centres.
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) have disruptive potential beyond
innovation in products, services, revenue streams and operating systems within
existing industry frameworks. They have the potential to disrupt the whole
economy, and society. Understanding this can help to frame the opportunities
and threats afforded by distributed ledger technologies — and how they can
inform changes in the role of the government, and the services it delivers.
The role of innovation
Organisations constantly innovate to improve their competitive advantage.
We tend to think of innovation in terms of new products and processes: the
manufacturing industry focuses on product innovation, while the service industry
develops through process innovation. Even small changes can affect the
structure of an industry: many manufacturers of computer disk drives failed to
adapt to the introduction of lighter and smaller drives, for example1
. Innovation
can also occur within business models, and often legitimise new relationships
within an industry to create ‘cooptetion’, where firms both co-operate and
compete2
.
The digital revolution has led to an
increasing awareness that innovation can
also occur at the level of the business
model3
, and even at the level of whole
industries — just think of how the Uber
app, which enables customers to hire
drivers in their vicinity, has disrupted the
taxi industry. Changing an organisation’s
viewpoint from short-term profit to long-
term wealth creation can lead to radically
altered activities and views of the future,
for example by using open source software
to create a platform that others can modify
and exploit4
.
Technology innovations, such as apps,
now allow customers to act as resource
What is the disruptive potential of
DLTs?
DLTs have the potential to be radically
disruptive. This is partly because of the
developments they have already helped to
bring about (eg in cryptography and software
engineering); the industries and services they
could innovate (eg financial services, real estate,
healthcare, identity management); and their
processing capability (eg low cost, real time,
immutability). But their disruptive potential also
lies in their underlying philosophy of distributed
consensus, open source, transparency and
community.
FAQ

54
integrators, ‘pulling’ solutions rather than having them pushed by suppliers.
This can challenge existing assumptions on value creation through, for
instance, ‘prosumption’ (a model where the same actors are involved in both
production and consumption, used by ridesharing service BlaBlaCar and the
accommodation rental service Airbnb), peer-to-peer lending and crowd sourcing.
This form of innovation impacts industry structure and has the potential to create
new industries; it changes “who does what”, and “who gets what”4
.
Developments in mobile payment systems introduced by new entrants are
opening up new customer bases (eg by allowing small merchants to turn their
phone into a bank card reader); previously unused data are being delivered to
new stakeholders to create new revenue streams to capture value; and there
is growing use of digital wallets and value transfer through different operating
systems such as mobile phone providers (eg M-Pesa) rather than banks. But
in many of these cases, the underlying transactions are still processed through
established players using legacy systems (eg clearing banks and competing
card schemes such as Visa and Mastercard). M-Pesa challenged the notion
that value transfer for exchange transactions had to be done through banks,
and leapfrogged several developmental stages. But these innovations still rely
on an existing hierarchical structure, using proprietary technology and trusted
intermediaries. Though the change improves customer convenience, and
significantly reduces costs to users and customers, this is evolution rather than
revolution.
Technological revolutions
Innovation generally proceeds incrementally, but is punctuated by radical
episodes, described by economist Joseph Schumpeter as “creative destruction”,
and by Carlota Perez as “technological revolutions”5
. These innovations exist
in a complex dynamic between technology, the economy and society, and
sometimes an innovation can fundamentally alter the way in which a particular
society or economy is organised.
The past few centuries have seen a handful of these technological revolutions:
the original Industrial Revolution, the Railway Revolution, and the Oil Revolution,
for example. Each one changed industrial structure, brought new forms of
energy, and impacted the way society could organise (see Table 1). Now we are
in the Information and Telecommunications Revolution, typified by information
intensity, connectivity, specialisation, and globalisation.
There are typically three pillars to these revolutions: significantly lower costs,
new communication methods, and changed infrastructure and logistics.
Lowering the costs of pervasive inputs generates market tensions — and,
often, financial bubbles and crashes — that ultimately lead to demands for
an overhaul of existing institutions. According to Perez, the revolutionary
innovations are characterised by a “set of inter-related radical breakthroughs,
forming a constellation of interdependent technologies” and the “strong
interconnectedness of the participating systems in their technologies and
markets, and their capacity to profoundly transform the rest of the economy (and
eventually society)”5
.

55
Description Year
(approx)
New
Technologies
and Industries
New
Infrastructure
‘Common Sense
Principles’
1st Industrial Revolution 1770 Mechanised
industry
Canals and water
power
Factory production,
productivity, local networks
2nd Steam and Railways 1830 Steam engines, iron
machinery
Railways, telegraph,
ports
Economies of agglomeration,
standardised parts,
urbanisation
3rd Steel, Electricity,
Heavy Engineering
1875 Cheap steel, heavy
chemistry
Electrical networks,
global shipping
Economies of scale and
vertical integration, science as
productive force, efficiency
4th Oil, Automobile, Mass
production
1910 Cars, cheap oil,
petrochemicals,
home appliances
Road networks,
universal electricity
Mass production, horizontal
integration standardised
products, energy intensity,
suburbanisation
5th Information and
Telecommunications
1970 Cheap
microelectronics,
computers, mobile
telephony
Worldwide digital
communications
Information intensity,
decentralised networks,
knowledge as capital,
economies of specialisation,
globalisation
Table 1: the five technological revolutions (adapted from Perez5
)
Each technological revolution brings a different set of ‘common sense
principles’ that change how businesses and society operate. These moved
from mechanisation in factories; through economies of scale and vertical
integration, mass production and standardisation; to functional specialisation,
hierarchical pyramids and bureaucracy; and on to today’s information intensity
and decentralised networks, marked by “heterogeneity, diversity, adaptability
and co-operation”5
. These revolutions ultimately lead to a new techno-economic
paradigm, with different cost structures, different opportunities for innovation,
and organisations built on markedly different principles. In each paradigm,
organisations develop along an ‘S’ curve, from disruptive innovation, through
use and exploitation (and resistance), to maturity and eventual replacement5
.
Changing these existing mind sets and replacing them with a new one requires
a transformational shift that requires new skills, abilities and knowledge, which
fundamentally change the way business operates.
Previous technological revolutions had little or no impact on pyramidal,
hierarchical systems of organisation and governance. But some suggest that our
new technological era enables a potentially emergent ‘Collaborative Commons’,
in which society is motivated by collaborative interests rather than individual
gain6
. This could imply distributed, consensual community structures that do
not depend on intermediaries organised in hierarchies (such as banks and
governments). DLTs represent a challenge in precisely this way.

56
Distributed ledger technology
DLTs are involved in potentially revolutionary innovations in a number of related
areas: virtual currencies, distributed open and transparent record keeping, non-
hierarchical networked systems, cryptography, and software engineering. DLTs
represent an innovation towards the radical end of the change spectrum because
of their potential to impact a broad extent of areas in the business model: from
new products and services, through operating systems and organisational
structures, to the sheer number of potential industries that could be affected. As
such they form part of the interconnected and inter-related breakthroughs that
form a technological revolution.
DLTs offer significant benefits to operational costs. Not only are they intrinsically
low-cost, they can also avoid duplication and inefficiencies in control and co-
ordination by enabling a common, open ledger that could operate at an industry
CASE STUDY 1
Diamonds
Leanne Kemp, Founder and CEO, Everledger
The diamond industry is highly susceptible
to criminal activity. Gems are small and easy
to transport in a covert manner, transactions
tend to be confidential, and diamonds retain
their value for many years. As such, diamonds
are involved in money laundering and terrorist
financing on a global scale.
Efforts to stem this illicit activity have included
tracking diamonds with paper documents
to certify their provenance. But document
tampering is widespread — indeed, documents
are sometimes created to cover up illegal
transactions — and several countries with
a major diamond trade still have insufficient
legislation to guard against these crimes.
To combat this, the diamond industry is
beginning to implement a system called
Everledger, based on block chain technology,
which establishes a digital ‘passport’ for each
diamond. This records its provenance, travel,
and transactions with a unique cryptographic
‘fingerprint’.
This system has three stages:
• Establish an e-ID (electronic identity) for
each diamond, by digitising its attributes
and a laser-inscribed serial number onto an
authoritative block chain ledger
• Assign a digital passport to the diamond
to record its travel, transaction history and
provenance
• Detect and guard against illegal activities or
fraudulent behaviour
By using an immutable block chain to hold this
data, the ledger could provide transparency
around all diamonds, revealing their origin, trail
of ownership, and the processes they might
have undergone. This ledger can act as a single
version of verifiable truth about diamonds for
the industry, governments, consumer markets,
border control and law enforcement agencies.
The system also enables the use of smart
contracts — terms and conditions relating to the
sale and transport of the diamonds that can be
carried out automatically. By using a block chain
to create a distributed ledger, smart contracts
can be tracked and used to verify business
relationships and agreements. The block
chain’s transparency offers a way to enforce
the contract, whether it is related to changes
in ownership of the diamond, financing of the
diamond, its insurance policy, registered rights
title and so on. Authenticating the transaction,
along with documentary proof of authenticity,
provides a vital evidentiary trail for government
and law enforcement.

57
level, thus reducing the systemic costs involved in processes such as cross
checking between individually held ledgers and databases. The ability to digitise
and securely store information on practically any asset, from diamonds to bags
of rice, allows organisations to identify and track their ownership and location
(see case study on diamond authentication, p56). New methods of recording
obligations and transfer of value using programmable contracts are being
developed using DLT: Ethereum, for example, is a decentralised platform for
‘smart contracts’ (see Chapter 1). Their potential for disruption may even extend
to a new landscape in which trusted or necessary intermediaries operating in a
hierarchical monopoly — a ‘hub and spoke’ model — are joined or replaced by
a more open, flatter community-based consensual structure (see case study on
corporate actions, p58).
The development of DLTs and associated
technologies also offers the possibility of real
time recording of transactions and access,
making transactions quicker and cheaper (see
SETL case study, p60). For example, motor
insurance could be based on the state of both
the car and its driver, with insurance provision
changing between suppliers depending on
behaviour, price and appetite for risk. This could
lead to a ‘programmable economy’ involving
smart contracts, relying on decentralised
networks and agents that require less human
involvement, and operating as distributed
autonomous organisations that deliver a wide
variety of products and services.
The best example of an operating DLT is
the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, and the most
obvious place for a new currency to innovate
is in financial services. DLTs offer a lower cost
of operation within existing structures and
governance, but they also provide the chance to reduce system-wide costs and
complexity. They could do this by removing the duplication and cost of many
separate, proprietary systems, and by challenging those systems’ centralised
architectures. Money creation no longer becomes the sole responsibility or
prerogative of national governments, for example. Instead, new forms of
currency could emerge where identity, and connections between people,
becomes the means of endorsing and underwriting transactions within a
community7
.
A further development enabled by the technological advances is the possibility
of adding specific attribute information (eg physical assets or contracts) to
the basic bitcoin to produce ‘coloured coins’. This opens up the possibility of
money with more than just value: it could carry attributes such as necessary
purpose, expiry date, or location of allowed use. For example, money may have
restrictions on the kind of goods and service it can be used to purchase (see
Chapter 6); or someone renting a flat through Airbnb may have their electronic
access key revoked if they fail to pay on time, or if their contract has expired.
What are the threats arising from
DLT?
Like any radical innovation, DLTs provide
opportunities to incumbents, and also
threats to those who are unable or fail
to respond. Through their distributed
consensual nature they also threaten the
role of trusted intermediaries in positions
of control within a hierarchy. Block chains
that explicitly create a new currency, such
as Bitcoin, challenge the current supremacy
of governments in managing the national
and international economic and monetary
system.
FAQ

58
Considerations for government
With its wide range of stakeholders, services and roles, the government
obviously has a multitude of different operations. Some distribute value rather
than create it, and others create and maintain effective regulatory regimes. Many
of these activities will be enhanced by the innovations afforded by DLT, and
others will be challenged. Change is possible at the product and service level,
and at the operational and organisational level.
CASE STUDY 2
Corporate actions
Dominic Hobson, Founder, COOConnect
Listed companies must provide their annual
accounts in a structured format, but any company
announcements that may require action by
investors or their representatives — known as
corporate actions — are typically published as
unstructured text, or in PDF format. Those relying
on the information have to read and interpret the
data manually before taking action.
Over 90 per cent of corporate actions are
distributed by data vendors, and then processed
on behalf of investors by an agent such as
a custodian or fund manager. Information is
manually extracted from the original, interpreted
and re-keyed by vendors. Levels of automation
are low, errors frequent, and the process highly
inefficient. One estimate puts the global cost of
corporate actions processing at up to $10 billion
per year1. Custodians frequently reimburse clients
for missed or incorrect execution of instructions.
Block chain technology could make this process
more efficient. Corporate actions represent
contractual information and value, which can in
principle be transferred directly between payers
and payees without the need for intermediaries,
provided the parties can trust the source data and
have the necessary experience to act upon the
information they receive.
If a block chain was coupled to an application
that captures and stores corporate action
announcements in a structured format, it could
be used to ensure that the data is from a verified
source, and prove the time-stamped date that
it was issued. This could be done in reverse
for the execution of instructions. A distributed
ledger based on such a block chain would
reassure parties at every point in the process that
their information is accurate, up-to-date, and
unchanged since it was published by the issuer.
In theory, it could eliminate all intermediaries
between the issuer and the fund manager,
guaranteeing the accuracy and timeliness of the
information.
The important question is whether this can
be organised in a fully-decentralised manner.
Corporate action information differs from simpler
contractual information (such as money changing
hands) because investors and shareholders
often need to use intermediaries with specialist
knowledge to act on their behalf.
These intermediaries may need to be able to
modify or augment the data before passing it
on, and the original corporate action itself may
change, through follow-up announcements that
supersede earlier ones. This modified data could
quickly lose its provenance as data vendors
share it with clients or package it with other data,
making the process difficult to automate.
On its own, block chain technology is currently
too slow to cope with these constantly shifting
packages of data. Bitcoin’s block chain can
handle about 20,000 transactions per hour, with
up to an hour’s latency before a transaction can
be trusted. That would be very inconvenient in a
corporate action process, which is subject to a
final deadline that fund managers prefer to keep
open as long as possible.

59
The Monmouth-based company Codel, which
handles corporate actions data, has overcome
these limitations by combining a block chain
system with its digital notary software. This
system creates an immutable audit trail that
parties along the chain can refer to in order
to establish authenticity, offering valuable
reassurance about the provenance of data.
These run alongside Instant Actions, a new
searchable central registry of corporate action
information that is a collaborative venture
between industry participants and Codel. The
registry’s data is stored in the ISO 15022 and
ISO 20022 formats, which provide guidance
for the distillation of financial information into
machine-readable formats. This means the
registry can be updated as corporate action
information is modified or superseded. This
guarantees the integrity and accuracy of the
information, which can then be made available
to all parties in the corporate actions chain via
the SWIFT secure network. This overcomes the
verification delays of using a block chain alone,
and the information — effectively shared as a
distributed ledger — can be updated, distributed
and modified in real-time, guaranteeing that it is
accurate and up to date.
The government could help such systems
to flourish by altering regulations to require
companies to issue corporate actions
information using a distributed ledger approach.
For instance, the process of ensuring that financial transfers such as welfare
payments go to the right person at the right time could be improved in a number
of ways (see Chapter 6). A single ledger carrying the identity and entitlements
of potential claimants, updated in real time, could be a radical innovation that is
much more efficient, reducing both operating and development costs. Adding
attributes to a particular payment could mean that as well as the amount, the
purpose and timeline of expenditure could be both specified and tracked. This
would, of course, involve extensive negotiations with stakeholders, and may
require some management
of this form of currency to
ensure any desired parity
with sterling.
There are innovative
possibilities in replacing
hierarchical organisations
with more distributed
systems. The government
and its agencies tend to
have tiers of authority,
both internally and within
their respective systems:
for instance, citizens are
represented by elected
officials in local, national and
supranational institutions;
financial matters involve
clearing banks, clearing
houses, central banks and
governments. Rather than
relying on periodic ballots
based largely on paper
records, democracy could
be achieved through a
voting block chain, with
electors given a digital
wallet and a ‘vote-coin’.
This has the potential to
reduce fraud (because
each voter can check that
their vote was counted),
but also to introduce a
real-time democracy with
a vote on any issue. This
raises significant questions
of social responsibility and
willingness to partake,
but could create more
distributed forms of
democracy.

60
Threats
The innovations enabled by DLTs may be attractive, but they are not without
significant threats, including those involving the nature of money and the role of
hierarchies and trust.
CASE STUDY 3
SETLing transactions
Dominic Hobson, Founder, COOConnect
Clearing, settlement, custody and registration
services all add a significant cost burden to
issuing, trading and holding securities. There are
a plethora of specialist agents and counterparties
involved in moving securities and cash between
investors. Not only are there specific charges
for these services, there are also ancillary costs
related to dealing with the myriad of different
systems that need to be interfaced and integrated
with business processes. In total, the global
finance industry pays around $65 billion to $80
billion per year in post-trade costs.
Block chain technology offers a means of
significantly reducing the complexity and cost of
these post-trade services, enabling participants to
operate a shared ledger that is stored on a large
number of servers acting as nodes. The authority
to execute transactions is conferred by public-
private key cryptography.
Transactions are added to the database in blocks,
and each block is reviewed by the nodes. The
block is only added to the database if the node
reaches a consensus that the block only contains
valid transactions. Apart from setting up and
maintaining the nodes, this block chain network
should be completely autonomous, and does not
require a controlling or regulating entity.
The SETL solution
A privately funded venture called SETL intends to
develop and deploy a specialist block chain that
will allow financial market participants to settle
securities transactions on a peer-to-peer basis,
and to maintain a distributed ‘golden’ ledger
of securities and cash balances. In particular,
SETL aims to have central bank money available
on the block chain. Its block chain will run on
an autonomous basis, and will integrate with
the current financial markets, payments and
exchange infrastructure.
SETL will be able to handle both the security and
cash side of each transaction and will also allow
for one-sided transfers of securities and cash,
either as simple payments or to settle bespoke
contracts, corporate actions, dividends and
coupons.
SETL will be designed to collapse the costly and
risky clearing and settlement process into a real-
time settlement process between counterparties.
In addition, by establishing a golden ledger of
ownership, SETL will substantially reduce the
overhead of securities registration and custody.
The SETL block chain will have the following
characteristics:
• Public keys used in the SETL block chain will
need to be signed by a certifying authority,
making it apparent to users of the block
chain who has certified each key. Certifying
authorities will maintain details of the real-
world identities of public key users, and
complete anti-money laundering and Know
Your Customer checks. SETL anticipates
that the certifying authority will disclose that
information when legally required to do so.
• It will have sufficient capacity to process
thousands of transactions per second,
commensurate with normal volumes in the
financial markets.
• It will be able to handle multiple asset classes,
including cash and securities of all types.
• It will allow multi-signature transactions,
enabling authorization by a designated subset
of users.
• It will allow ‘atomic transactions’ (ie either
all transactions occur, or none do), so that

61
transactions will only be processed if all
stages have been submitted and properly
authorized.
• It will contain specific functionality designed
to facilitate the management of liquidity by
the participants.
• It will maintain a complete record of
transactions and balances historically for
the purpose of simplifying regulatory record
keeping, transaction reporting and audit.
Wider benefits
Balances of cash and other assets currently
tend to be maintained on specific systems and
can only be deployed for particular purposes:
in other words, they are ‘system specific.’ Cash
and assets held on a block chain are, in contrast,
available to be deployed for any purpose. This
will both reduce the amount that banks have to
deploy in liquidity reserves, and will simplify their
management of liquidity.
SETL expects to be able to provide a solution
that will run alongside the existing Bank of
England Real Time Gross Settlement (RTGS)
system, providing a safe and viable alternative
should RTGS be unavailable at any time. SETL
will be available at all times, reducing the inter-
bank risk that currently accumulates when RTGS
is not running eg overnight and at weekends.
The SETL payment and settlement system will
be simple, unified and immediate. If the UK is
the first to deploy such a system, it will promote
London and sterling as the location and currency
of choice for financial services. It is likely that
once established in London, the system would
be adopted more widely, further consolidating
London’s position as the global leader in
international finance.
DLTs could disrupt conventional financial services, whose core business is
money and value transfer. But money itself is already being disrupted in all its
forms and uses through cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, an invented money
with no government backing; and ‘colored coins’, which allow units of currency
to carry different types of
value. The management of
money, and through that the
economy, is seen by many to
be a key role of government,
so alternative currency
systems may pose a threat
to that role.
DLTs pose a threat to any
hierarchical structure through
an ability to connect and
operate in a distributed
network, without trusted or
necessary intermediaries,
by replacing top-down
control with consensus.
Hierarchies can have serious
disadvantages: duplication,
added cost, potential abuse
of power, and opportunities
for financial mismanagement.
But hierarchies do offer
advantages whenever a
neutral broker is needed;
and, for example, in
representative democracy.
Representative democracy
provides stability and an
ongoing process of civil
government that could
be threatened by wider
use of DLTs. Nation states
are already facing threats
caused by globalisation and
increasingly fluid borders,
yet some of the original
developers and adherents
of Bitcoin espouse extreme
anti-government views. The
challenge will be to ensure
that DLT and its associated
innovations are directed
towards a connected,
productive society, within a
supportive infrastructure.

62
Conclusions
The convergence of creativity and technology can lead to radical changes in
existing business models and the organisational structures they sit within. DLT is
presently as much a series of challenges and questions to existing structures, as
opposed to a set of answers and practical possibilities. But it appears to have at
least some qualities, and to be in the appropriate context, to produce change at
the more revolutionary end of the spectrum.
DLTs offer significant challenges to established orthodoxy and assumptions
of best practice, far beyond the recording of transactions and ledgers. These
potentially revolutionary organisational structures and practices should be
experimentally trialled — perhaps in the form of technical and non-technical
demonstrator projects — so that practical, legal and policy implications can be
explored.
Radical innovation in business models, particularly in structures and operating
systems, can occur through experimentation within a relaxed but effective
regulatory environment. The government should consider how regulatory
regimes can best encourage and exploit an environment in which these low-cost
operating models and organisational structures could be explored, with new
entrants able to participate freely.
More research is needed, at a system-wide level, on the financial costs and
benefits of adopting distributed ledger technology. This would enable the
government to identify what existing frictional costs could be avoided, and where
remaining cost savings and opportunities could be found.

64
CHAPTER 6
Applications
inGovernmentDistributed ledger technology is already having a profound
impact on how private companies manage data and interact with
customers and suppliers. If applied within government it could
reduce costs, increase transparency, improve citizens’ financial
inclusion and promote innovation and economic growth. This
chapter considers five case studies that illustrate those benefits.
Author
Catherine Mulligan, Research Fellow, Imperial College London and Head of Digital
Strategy and Economics, Future Cities Catapult. Additional contributions from Simon
Taylor, VP for Blockchain R+D, Barclays; and Mike Halsall, Global Grand Challenges,
Singularity University, NASA Research Park, California

65
Chapter 6:Applications in Government
Introduction
Distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can do far more than simply manage
digital currencies such as Bitcoin. The concepts and structures developed for
distributed ledgers and the block chains they use are extremely portable and
extensible to other areas of economic and social activity. As such, they have a
profound potential for application within government operations — indeed, the
eventual impact of DLTs on British society may be as significant as foundational
events such as the creation of Magna Carta1
.
If applied properly — and issues of privacy, security, identity and trust are
addressed thoroughly (see Chapter 4) — distributed ledgers create genuine
opportunities for the government and other local and regional authorities in the
following ways:
• Reduced cost of operations, including reducing fraud and error in payments
• Greater transparency of transactions between government agencies and
citizens
• Greater financial inclusion of people currently on the fringes of the financial
system
• Reduced costs of protecting citizens’ data while creating the possibility to
share data between different entities, allowing for the creation of information
marketplaces
• Protection of critical infrastructure such as bridges, tunnels etc
• Reduced market friction, making it easier for small and medium-sized
enterprises (SMEs) to interact with local and national authorities
• Promotion of innovation and economic growth possibilities for SMEs
This very broad range of possible benefits are delivered through the application
of DLTs in three different ways:
• Within currency applications
• To manage contracts and create new forms of contracts
• To prompt new applications by third parties, and provide more efficient ways
of structuring and carrying out activities
Within this chapter, we illustrate each of these opportunities and its application to
the different technical implementations through five separate case studies:
• Protecting critical infrastructure against cyberattacks
• Reducing operational costs and tracking eligibility for welfare support, while
offering greater financial inclusion
• Transparency and traceability of how aid money is spent
• Creating opportunities for economic growth, bolstering SMEs and increasing
employment
• Reducing tax fraud

66
Case 1: Protecting Critical Infrastructure
Overview
DLTs can enable the UK and its government to better protect critical civil
infrastructure against cyberattacks.
Background
Digital technologies are increasingly embedded in countries’ critical
infrastructures, and many of these systems are also connected via the internet.
This exposes them to the possibility of attacks from hackers or other nations that
are able to go undetected by existing cybersecurity defences. It is, for example,
possible to seize control of critical routers, allowing them to be monitored and
manipulated. This would allow the data from all the companies and government
organisations behind the routers to be captured. Moreover, as various other
embedded technologies are adopted in civil infrastructure — including bridges,
railways, tunnels, flood barriers and energy installations — the chance that such
attacks could cause damage to property and human life increases.
DLT proposition
DLT may be applied to ensure that the operating system and firmware used
in a piece of critical infrastructure has not been tampered with. A distributed
ledger could monitor the state and integrity of the software for illicit changes,
and assure that data transmitted from systems that apply Internet of Things (IoT)
technologies has not been tampered with.
Outcomes
• Efficiency and effectiveness improvements to large-scale infrastructure,
ensuring better protection to human life
• Data integrity can be assured for transmissions to and from critical
infrastructure
Maturity level
Ready
Case 2: Department for Work and Pensions
Overview
Novel payment models will enable HM Treasury (HMT) and the Department
for Work and Pensions (DWP) to distribute welfare support more efficiently
and improve policy delivery. By applying DLTs in the registration and payment
processes for government grants and benefits, DWP will be better equipped to:
• Prevent financial losses through fraud and error
• Support the most vulnerable citizens by offering them the benefits of full
financial inclusion
• Support the achievement of the government’s wider policy objectives,
especially getting people out of poverty in a sustainable way
• Offer good value for money and place public expenditure on a sustainable
footing

67
Background
The DWP pays out roughly £166 billion of taxpayer’s money in welfare support
per year. Some £3.5 billion of that sum is overpaid through fraud (£1.2 billion),
claimant error (£1.5 billion) and official error (£0.7 billion)2
of which £930 million
is recovered. Adding in the fraud and error that exists in the current tax credit
system, which will be moving to DWP over the next few years as an element of
the new Universal Credit regime, there is a total baseline of over £5 billion per
year in gross overpayments.
Apart from the direct financial cost of overpaying money to those not entitled to
it, the taxpayer also bears the cost of post-payment intervention (debt collection,
investigation and prosecution, claimant queries and dispute resolution).
A further, as yet unquantified, proportion of welfare support spending will fail to
meet policy objectives in less identifiable ways. For example, it may effectively
fund expenditure by claimants that arises from the way that welfare support is
distributed, ultimately servicing non-bank debt and paying the ‘poverty premium’3
.
DLT proposition
A large number of welfare claimants are un- or under-banked4
and face barriers
to greater financial inclusion such as credit checks, access to traditional financial
products, and the costs of unauthorised transactions. DLTs offer a cheap and
supportive means of getting these claimants into the benefits system.
Digital identities could be confirmed through distributed ledgers running on
securely-encoded devices — or even through software on a mobile device —
which would allow end-users to receive benefits directly, at reduced transaction
costs to banks or local authorities. This may allow them to become more fully
included in the financial system through a secure distribution point that is more
reliable than a bank account. Such a solution could also be linked with other
systems to reduce the level of fraud and official error in the delivery of benefits,
as identities would be more difficult to forge.
Such activities may help to achieve one of the DWP’s principal policy objectives:
to lift people sustainably out of the cycle of poverty and state dependence.
Through the innovative application of such technologies, it would be possible
— with agreement from the benefit claimant in question — to set rules at both
the recipient and merchant ends of welfare transactions. This may present
the opportunity for ministers to consider options for achieving better policy
outcomes from the distribution of welfare support by agreeing or setting rules
around the use of benefits.
Outcomes
• Reduction of losses due to fraud and official error
• Enable ministers to assure taxpayers that public funds are being used more
effectively for the purposes of meeting genuine need
Maturity level
• Requires a lot of education for the recipients
• Requires some integration of sterling onto a distributed ledger for benefits
• May create a subset of the economy with a stigma attached to ‘benefit coins’

68
Case 3: Stregthening International Aid Systems
Overview
DLT could enable the government to better control the distribution of foreign
aid, and to ensure that the funds reach the intended recipients. This will also
help ministers help improve transparency and encourage effective financial
management. The use of DLT could therefore help in honouring the UK’s
international commitments to achieve the Global Goals.
Background
In order to meet global obligations, countries must support Global Goal action
plans that incorporate transparency, accountability and integrity measures5
.
International aid donors place significant emphasis on helping to develop more
transparent and robust aid systems. Activities preventing fraud, theft and mis-
appropriation of funds can be expensive. Technological advancements that could
help strengthen prevention efforts would be beneficial for the wider aid system
Fraud and corruption reduces opportunities for poverty alleviation, reduces
inward investment, and is strongly linked to lower educational achievement.
There is, therefore, a great opportunity to apply DLT in international aid in order
to provide transparency and traceability of funds. Proving that money is being
well spent could encourage nations to give more, and also all funders to target
key outcomes more effectively.
DLT proposition
The key aspect of this proposition would be to use three main aspects of DLT.
Firstly, it would allow international donors to issue coins that have a sterling
value, without encountering many of the bureaucratic hurdles of traditional
banking. Distributed ledgers achieve this through their lack of geographic
boundaries — they operate in the same way in any jurisdiction in the world.
There is an opportunity, therefore, to reduce the foreign exchange fees for
international aid significantly below standard transaction costs. Moreover, it is
possible to create smart contracts that can be used “to create self-enforcing
contracts between strangers, offering citizens a framework for transactions
independent of the domestic judicial and executive branch”6
.
Secondly, international donors could take advantage of DLT’s ability to reduce
the fungibility of cash, offering the possibility of reliable and irreversible transfers
of digital goods — in this case aid funding. In addition, digital ledgers solve
the double-spending problem: where digital currencies may allow end-users to
spend the same unit of currency twice, digital ledgers prevent this because each
‘coin’ is unique. This makes payment without intermediation possible6
. In cases
where aid is meant to directly support end-users, it is possible to bypass the
limitations and restrictions placed on currencies and banking services in some
countries through peer-to-peer transfer of funds.
Thirdly, the use of unique sterling-linked coins could prevent them from being
spent on items not deemed appropriate within the international aid context. For
example, money sent to build infrastructure intended to reduce poverty could not
be appropriated for other purposes. This stems from DLT’s ability to trace exactly
where the currency has been spent and by whom.

69
Outcomes
• Increased transparency of international aid spending targeted specifically at
the Global Goals to reduce corruption to better achieve desired development
objectives.
Maturity level
• Unpredictability of donor demands may create bigger problems than fraud
and corruption, and would therefore need to be carefully aligned to project
outcomes to ensure effectiveness.
• In every case of international aid, international donors needs to maintain a
relationship with the host government. Where issues of corruption are linked
to individuals within specific ministries or embedded within the systems of
host governments, it is crucial to get buy-in from the recipient nations for this
type of system.
• Converting distributed ledgers into usable services of this nature requires the
creation of a whole range of complementary capabilities
Case 4: Reducing Market Friction and Enabling Innovation
Overview
One of the greatest potential benefits of DLT is its ability to remove barriers
and friction in the market and enable the creation of new forms of information
marketplaces7
. As discussed in Chapter 1, the sharing of information between
economic entities through distributed ledgers would enable new forms of
innovation to emerge. This would allow ministers to achieve policy outcomes
centred on assisting SMEs achieve economic growth through effective use of
technological innovation.
Background
Reducing transaction costs for SMEs when dealing with local and national
government would enable these businesses to move more freely within the
market and face lower overall operating costs. At the same time, enabling these
companies to register their intellectual property (IP) within a distributed ledger,
rather than through traditional patent applications, may reduce the overall
number of contract disputes. Contract disputes make up 57% of all litigation in
the UK, more than any other category of legal action.
DLT proposition
DLTs could be applied in a broad variety of areas, particularly in smart contracts
and asset registration. By registering assets on a distributed ledger, all property
could effectively become ‘smart assets’, providing a robust and trustworthy
proof of record for a broad variety of services that currently cost SMEs time and
money. Examples include registering IP and patents, wills, notary services, NHS
health data and SIPPs/Pensions. Distributed ledgers offer a new way to co-
ordinate these types of services, in a truly digitally-enabled manner, with scale
and efficiency.
Distributed ledgers have the ability to handle micropayments, decentralised
exchange, token earning and spending, and transfers in a way that the web
currently does not8
. As a result, DLT has the potential to re-invent the operating
costs of local jurisdictions and businesses through9
:

70
• Business licencing
• Registration
• Insurance
• Taxation management at many municipal and regulatory levels
• Pension data
It is possible that DLTs could help to completely remove some functions, as
companies are able to register identities not just for their businesses, but also for
their assets. More importantly, citizens can also have more control over their data
assets (such as health data), which are traditionally held by government. This
would enable citizens to check whether their data has been accessed and used
in the correct manner for the correct reasons.
In addition, the use of distributed ledgers allows for sharing of data across new
forms of information marketplaces — or possibly even data utilities — allowing
for the sharing of pension data.
Outcomes
• Reduced transaction costs for SMEs and streamlined cost of operations for
local and national government. Additionally, having a trustworthy proof of
ownership for digital assets such as IP will reduce the options for litigation,
providing an overall social benefit for UK society.
Maturity level
• Requires local and national authorities to adopt DLTs
Case 5: European VAT
Overview
The economy can be categorised in many ways, including (i) the tax-compliant
economy, (ii) the tax quasi-compliant economy and (iii) the tax non-compliant
(or ‘black market’) economy. VAT shortfalls occur in all three for a variety of
reasons that may include business insolvency; creative use of international laws
to structure companies in such a way as to circumvent tax liability; or the more
straightforward ‘no paperwork, cash only’ scenarios. The annual shortfall in the
EU’s value added tax (VAT) revenue is estimated to be between €151 billion and
€193 billion10
.
DLT has both the exponential growth characteristics and the potential to make
transactions significantly more transparent. The UK could play a pivotal role in
supporting the development of technology, process protocol and implementation
solutions for DLT in order to reduce the EU’s VAT shortfall.
Background
Moore’s Law correctly forecasted the exponential growth in digital computational
processing density several decades ago. In fact, information technology has
been growing exponentially since the late 1800s, with current predictions
indicating this should continue throughout the 21st century.
Information technologies are self-generating because they help to navigate
the unknowns of nature through scientific discovery. This in turn enables us
to develop faster and more cost effective technologies, thus uncovering more

71
of nature’s secrets, which ultimately leads to a compounding of technological
capacity.
There are numerous information technologies available to help significantly
reduce VAT shortfalls, including machine learning, super digital computers,
quantum analogue computing, and distributed ledger technology. The key
challenge is for governments to implement and leverage these technologies
faster than organised crime groups can deploy them.
DLT proposition
The development of an EU-wide series of VAT standards and protocols would
enable DLT to be deployed across Europe, with unilateral alignment of all VAT
accounting transactions, from invoices to bank receipts. The system could
include smart contracts designed to outsmart the tax quasi-compliant economy,
which would also help to address the various threshold differences in VAT
applicability across EU member states.
With machine-learning devices reading the EU’s VAT transactions in real time,
erroneous transactions (including so-called carousel fraud) are far more likely
to be spotted than by the current methods of auditing. Increasing traceability
and transparency — including payment providers, banks and other financial
institutions — would make the black-market economy more difficult to conceal.
Outcomes
• Reduce the administrative burden imposed on companies and other
organisations to collect and pay VAT
• Increase transparency of real-time transactions throughout the economy
• Create opportunities to assess credit risk more accurately, reducing losses
caused by insolvency
• Provide data to lenders that offer finance to SMEs, including credit factoring
• Enable smart contracts between treasuries and commerce
Maturity level
• Technologically ready
• Important to bring payment organisations into the conversation early on, as
their data inputs are also required to ensure visibility over payment settlements
• Government agencies need to be able to handle DLT for tax
• End-users and small business owners need to understand how to use DLT for
effective tax management
Conclusion
Distributed ledgers undoubtedly hold value for government, offering new ways
of operating that reduce fraud, error and the costs of delivering services to
underserved users. At the same time, these technologies offer new forms of
innovation and the ability to reduce transaction costs for SMEs in the UK. This
chapter has highlighted only some of the possible use cases. As distributed
ledgers are adopted more widely, it is likely that a new form of operating
government services will emerge.

72
G
CHAPTER 7
lobal
PerspectivesOrganisations that do digital business in cyberspace must be able
to trust — and be trusted by — their partners. They also need
to be interoperable with large and growing communities of other
organisations around the world. Block chains have the potential to
contribute to both.
Author
Patrick Curry, Director of the British Business Federation Authority; Christopher Sier,
Director, FiNexus; and Mike Halsall, Global Grand Challenges, Singularity University,
NASA Research Park, California

73
Chapter 7: Global Perspectives
Introduction
The rate of global change — both good and bad — is accelerating, driven by
internet-enabled globalisation, societal expectations, and increasing competition
for resources. Unlike the developing world, developed nations and their citizens
have a consumerist ethos and privacy expectations that can conflict with
traditional, resilient community values and personal norms of behaviour. This
has left the state, rather than the community, responsible for helping those
in distress and hard times. Governments struggle to satisfy these growing
demands of consumer expectation and seemingly bottomless social assistance.
US President John F. Kennedy’s call — “ask not what your country can do for
you, ask what you can do for your country” — has increasing relevance today:
most citizens want to help their country but they lack the means to engage in the
digital age. They want to be part of the herd, not a vulnerable outlier.
One consequence of this lack of community behaviour is a polarisation in
attitudes, an emergence of differing perceptions and an increasing tendency
to oversimplify complex changes into a series of binary disconnected issues.
The global reality is a complex mesh of physical, virtual, legal, historical,
geographical, societal, behavioural, economic, informational and technological
factors. The rate of change and the speed of introduction of new, disruptive
technologies add to this complexity. Scale, speed and complexity have to be
considered together. This makes it increasingly difficult for industry leaders and
national governments to understand this mesh, and to plan, implement and
realise benefits using their traditional non-collaborative organisational structures.
The initiative lies with those who are more agile, such as the financial markets
and organised crime. Increasingly, developing nations such as Kenya and
Rwanda are leaping to new technologies, unencumbered by this legacy. In the
developed world, some smaller and more homogeneous nations are making
significant advances that are transcending borders to provide international
benefits, particularly in Europe (see case studies on European energy markets,
p76, and on Estonia, p80).
The hallmarks of advancing digital nations include:
• A digitally-informed leadership
• An empowered, focused government department for all national digital
transformation, which is internationally minded and collaborates closely with
all industry sectors
• A living, collaborative national plan, which is industry-led with government
investment
• Technologically aware, qualified and experienced senior political officials in
every government organisation
• Engineers and digital business leaders as elected politicians.
The UK has much to do in each of these areas if it is to become one of the
leading digital nations. Yet the world increasingly relies on digital economies. This
requires us to do more than apply computer technology to existing economic

74
models; instead, we must reassess our understanding of what a digital economy
is becoming, as well as its constituent actors and activities. This is similar to the
transition from cash-based to asset-based accounting, which requires every
organisation to have a much wider understanding of the complexity of supply
chains, services and markets, and demands a different approach to collaborative
risk management, decision making, gainsharing and shared liability. To do
digital business in cyberspace, an organisation has to be able to trust, and be
trustworthy. It also has to be interoperable with large and increasing communities
of other organisations. Trust and interoperability are foundational in cyberspace,
much more so than in the physical world. Block chains have the potential to
contribute to both, but the magic is not in the technology — it is in how we use it
nationally.
Trust and interoperability
Trust is a risk judgement between two or more people, organisations or nations.
In cyberspace, trust is based on two key requirements:
• Prove to me that you are who you say you are (authentication)
• Prove to me that you have the permissions necessary to do what you ask
(authorisation)
If I am not satisfied with the response, I can still choose to allow you to proceed,
but I am incurring risk. However, there is no viable relationship unless others trust
me too. In this sense, being trustworthy is analogous to being creditworthy.
Interoperability involves several factors:
• Data interoperability. We need to understand each other in order to
work together, so our data has to have the same syntactic and semantic
foundations
• Policy interoperability. Our policies need to be aligned or based on agreed
common policy, so that I can be confident that you will treat my information in
the way that I expect (and vice versa)
• The effective, collaborative implementation and use of international standards
Information protection is about access control, which requires authentication,
authorisation and more. Authentication requires identity management of all
entities involved (usually people, organisations, devices and software), to a
given, internationally-defined level of assurance (LoA). Authentication across
communities of multiple authorities or organisations requires federated identity
management (FIM).
At an international scale, such FIM currently exists only at ‘low assurance’,
designated LoA 1 in international standards1
. It is primarily applied in social
networking where multi-jurisdictionality is not a significant issue. Google,
GakuNin (the Japanese universities network), Microsoft, Ping Identity, The Nikkei
newspaper, Tokyu Corporation, mixi, Yahoo! Japan and SoftBank have also
deployed FIM systems; and there are more mature deployments underway by
other organisations, such as Deutsche Telecom, AOL, and Salesforce.com.
Medium assurance (LoA 2) requires evidence of identity during enrolment to
meet Know Your Customer (KYC) requirements, which financial institutions

75
require of consumers and businesses in financial transactions. There is some
federation at LoA 2, mostly in banking systems.
Several industries use security systems based on Public Key Infrastructure
(PKI) federations that rely on a cryptographic standard called X.509. These offer
high and very high assurance levels (LoA 3 and 4) for employee authentication,
notably in aviation, the pharmaceutical industry, defence, banking and,
increasingly, e-health. The US and China have the largest deployments of
international-standard PKI federations, closely followed by South Korea (where
it is mandated for all companies by regulation), Estonia, Netherlands and
many others. At LoA 3+, it is possible to link a user’s identity to other trust
functions, such as legally-robust digital signatures, identity-linked encryption
and physical access control in buildings. PKI federation isn’t the only option for
high assurance supply chain collaboration and sharing sensitive information at
scale, but it is the de facto norm today. Block chains offer a potential alternative,
but a combination of PKI federation and block chain federation offers even more
attractive opportunities for greater digital accountability, assurance and trust in
business processes, coupled with exploiting new technologies.
In the UK, only the police service operates a large-scale PKI federation in
accordance with international standards, albeit in a basic form. With best-practice
collaborative governance, this could be expanded to support many UK government
services, including the emergency services; and international collaborations in
areas as broad as trade, border controls or migrants and refugees, with other allies
who have similar PKI federations today. The strategy for the government’s Public
Services Network to use PKI federation for employee authentication has yet to
be implemented, however, so there is no high assurance identity management
of employees or collaborative trust across government organisations, based on
international standards, that could federate with industry partners and international
allies eg US, France and the Netherlands. In combination with block chains, PKI
federation could provide enhanced services extending to the privacy-friendly
handling of identity data and greater traceability of payments.
The NHS has a very large PKI, but it does not comply with international
standards and cannot (yet) federate. The MOD has international obligations
to establish PKIs with the US-centric defence supply chains, and similar
obligations under the NATO Cyber Defence Action Plan, but has no published
implementation plans. Industry is considering other potential areas for PKI
federation eg for countering food fraud, described in the 2014 Elliott Review
into the integrity and assurance of food supply networks. It is also developing
a memorandum of understanding with a South Korean government agency
that would enable British companies to have PKI credentials that could be
used in the supply chains of Korean businesses eg Samsung, Kia, Hyundai and
Daewoo (which is currently the manufacturer of the largest container ships in the
world). The UN’s International Maritime Organisation is developing international
guidelines for maritime cybersecurity, and has the potential to leverage the UK-
Korea PKI federation initiative. There are more examples in other areas, and all
would benefit from a forum where these discussions can come together in a
collaborative manner.
The EU Parliament approved the Electronic Identification, Authentication and
Trust Services Regulation (eIDAS) in September 2014, giving nations three years

76
to comply. Under eIDAS, if any nation ‘notifies’ an e-ID scheme for its citizens,
the e-IDs are legally required to be accepted by every other member state
for electronic public purposes. Much work has yet to be done, but eIDAS is
forcing governments and industry to consider their overall plans to exploit FIM
for societal and commercial benefit. In the UK, the government has introduced
a federated, standards-based approach to identity assurance: GOV.UK Verify.
GOV.UK Verify has been built to respond to the latest developments in the
market by having competing providers of identity services and allowing users to
choose which one to use. Enhancing and linking Verify to block chains and PKI
federations could add value to Verify itself. Block chain and high assurance PKI
federation solutions could benefit from Verify’s privacy-friendly inputs. Together,
in their different ways, they would contribute significantly to the UK’s digital
economy, border control and its efforts to combat cybercrime.
CASE STUDY 1
European energy retail market
Igor Nai Fovino and Jean-Pierre Nordvik, Joint Research Centre, European Commission
The European Commission Energy Union
Framework Strategy1
sets out the vision of an
‘Energy Union’ “with citizens at its core, where
citizens take ownership of the energy transition,
benefit from new technologies to reduce their
bills, participate actively in the market, and where
vulnerable consumers are protected”. However,
while the development of energy smart-grids is
progressing steadily, the retail energy market is
still waiting for modernisation. The Commission’s
policy initiative ‘New Energy Market Design’ will
have to face several crucial points:
• how to deliver appropriate information on
costs and consumption to consumers so that
they can identify new opportunities in a fully-
integrated continental energy market
• how to reward for active participation, facilitate
switching of contracts and manage demand-
response to dynamic prices
• how to ensure interoperability in the market
for residential energy services, expanding
consumers’ choices, and enable a real gain
from self-generation and self-consumption,
and local micro-generation.
In this context, distributed ledgers can act as a
new driver to enhance the level of integration and
development of the energy retail market. The Joint
Research Centre2
of the European Commission is
currently investigating their practical applications,
such as the following cases.
1. Micro-Generation energy market. Micro-
generation is the capacity for consumers to
produce energy in-house or in a local community.
The concept of ‘market’ indicates the possibility
of trading energy that has been micro-generated
among consumers and ‘prosumers’. Traditionally,
however, this market has been served by pre-
defined bilateral agreements between prosumers
and retail energy suppliers. Until now, electricity-
generating prosumers have not had real access
to the energy market, which remains a privileged
playing field for the institutionalised energy
suppliers. This has greatly limited the economic
advantages of micro-generation for end-
users. Distributed ledgers, in combination with
smart-metering systems and next-generation
batteries (to accumulate energy locally), have the
potential to open the energy-market to prosumer
production. Smart meters could be used to
account and register the micro-generated energy
on a distributed ledger (becoming the equivalent
of an ‘energy-coin’ system).
Self-generated electricity could normally be either
consumed within the house, or accumulated in
next-generation batteries for later use, or simply
given back to the grid. Alternatively, thanks to the
distributed and pervasive nature of the ledger,

77
the produced energy could also be redeemed
elsewhere, for example when charging an
electric vehicle abroad; or sold through the
ledger to the best buyer, according a mechanism
similar to that of a stock-exchange market.
2. Energy Contracts Ledger. A consumer who
intends to change energy supplier currently
needs to close their contract with their current
supplier, then open a new contract with a new
supplier, and revisit the contractual conditions
of all complementary energy services provided
by third parties. Managing the administrative
complexity of these operations is a real barrier
to developing a competitive energy retail market,
and is a source of cost for energy suppliers and
distributors. Using distributed ledgers to record
energy contracts online would greatly simplify
these operations. It would allow consumers
to finalise the transition from one supplier to
another with just a few clicks on a computer or
mobile device. Likewise, energy suppliers and
energy service-providers would save resources
otherwise devoted to these administrative
operations.
There are still questions about the scalability,
security and stability of such applications.
However, the benefits are so promising that they
certainly merit further investigation.
In cyberspace, every entity and transaction binds or links to an organisation.
Establishing the validity of an organisation to the desired LoA, and information
about it in real or near-real time, is a fundamental digital requirement. Increasing
use of block chains will considerably increase this requirement to avoid any
records in the chain becoming tainted. A new international standard is being
developed for digital organisational identification, known as the Register of Legal
Organisations (ROLO). Several nations, including the US, are already considering
adapting the ROLO specification to meet their needs. Today, globalisation
and the lack of digitally-suitable business registers is resulting in a situation,
particularly in the EU, where the majority of financially active organisations in
a country are not registered in that country or at all, but it is not possible to
tell the difference. UK industry and government organisations, including law
enforcement and cybersecurity organisations, urgently need ROLO UK as a
digital trust anchor. Industry
is starting to develop ROLO
UK, which would benefit
from greater participation
by government user
organisations.
Digital Economies
Digital economies seek to
harness speed, reach and
efficiency. Federated trust
enables confidence and risk
reduction. Interoperability
enables efficiency and re-
use of capabilities. In a
mature supply chain, each
time a company competes
in a new programme or
sector, re-use gives it
agility and a competitive
advantage: a view held by
aerospace and defence
companies and voiced
publicly by Airbus, Boeing,
BAE Systems, Lockheed
Martin, Northrop Grumman,
Raytheon2
and others.
In February 2014, Neelie
Kroes, then a vice-
president of the European
Commission and its digital
agenda commissioner,
stated that “democracy
must talk to technology3
”.
She argued that we are
making a transition to a

78
data-driven world in which trust is key, and that “without security there is no
privacy”. She pointed out that strong cybersecurity is important to Europe’s
Single Digital Market, and that the EU Cyber Security Strategy is providing the
right building blocks. Without such initiatives, she concluded, democracy would
“fail to manage technology”.
The dialogues on these topics involving the EU, US and the Association
of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) are gradually converging in banking,
electronics, pharmaceuticals, food, maritime, aerospace, cyberspace and law
enforcement. Through the UN and organisations like the Council of Europe,
there is a growing push for developed nations to help developing nations as
they become part of the global digital economy. But a lack of digital governance
hampers developing nations, creating major opportunities for cybercrime and
terrorism that ultimately target developed nations. The Commonwealth could
play a significant role in tackling this situation. Collaboration is key.
The potential of decentralised ledgers and block chains
Economies rely on collaborative governance to provide trust in the financial
markets, ensuring that all play by agreed rules. Digital economies are the
same. The primary reason that block chains are associated with cybercrime
is an absence of strategic governance to establish agreed rules and ensure
compliance. Once such governance (with policies, procedures and mechanisms)
and enforcement exist, the true societal benefits of block chains can be realised.
Governmental concerns about the instabilities and vulnerabilities associated with
cryptocurrencies and their trading exchanges have made governments cautious
regarding the use of block chains, and, generally, they would prefer industry to
lead in the development of a better situation.
The main areas for development today are:
• Ungoverned block chains are used for unregulated and criminal activities,
particularly where parties seek to be anonymous and unaccountable
• Startup companies are working with leading banks to develop trusted
cryptocurrencies and block chains eg a ‘trusted Bitcoin’. This could offer
significant benefit to major online consumer companies
• Private block chains are being used in closed commercial communities to
support digital trust mechanisms, under their own rules. These are non-
interoperable and cannot scale to support supply chains
Only recently have governments started to work with industry to explore the
strategic potential of block chains. But implementation will accelerate, driven by
four major enablers:
• To provide a basis for cryptographic trust in a similar way to PKI. This means
that block chains could federate with each other and also with existing
PKI federations. Block chains could leverage PKI’s deployed scale and
governance, while PKIs could leverage block chain’s payment and ledger
functions. These synergies would open up new opportunities that smart,
collaborative governance could accelerate.
• Permissioned ledgers contain a data field of unlimited size. Information about
a transaction, including the contract, licence or copyright, could be included,

79
providing a strong additional factor for trust. This enables ‘smart contracts’
(ie the binding of the contract to the transaction — see Chapter 1 for more),
offering efficiency and non-repudiation.
• Leveraging new protocols, such as the new Uniform Economic Transfer
Protocol (UETP) that links the producer to the carrier, the customer, the
product, the payment and the banks, and also to the smart contract.
The Netherlands is leading on this, with UK industry and possible police
participation. US involvement is beginning and will accelerate due to their
emerging regulations for cyberassurance across all supply chains. Other
nations, such as South Korea and Japan, are expected to be involved soon.
• Smartphones are becoming the de facto trusted user device. The latest
smart phones include important new security features, including: Trusted
Platform Module, which secures digital certificates and cryptographic keys
for authentication, encryption and signing; Trusted Execution Environment,
where secure processing occurs without the operating system that could be
vulnerable to malware; and Trusted User Interface, which prevents a malware
attack between the user and the device. Using near-field communication,
the smart phone could interact securely with some national e-ID cards and
electronic passports, so that a user could interact securely online with an
authority eg at a border or with the police. Consumers and employees now
have a secure, trusted device for the first time ever, with which they can
sign transactions (eg using a block chain) and payments (eg using a ‘trusted
Bitcoin’). Samsung, HTC, and LG have been selling tens of millions of such
advanced security-enabled smartphones, ready for the software to be
deployed in early-mid 2016. Apple and others are expected to follow suit.
Strong collaborative and pervasive governance is required to ensure that these
capabilities are not abused or misused. These four enablers are encouraging
greater use of block chains and distributed ledgers for financial purposes, and
for a growing range of other digital, data-centric purposes across supply chains
and with governments. As such systems mature, and their capabilities expand,
these four enablers could help to solve a number of difficult social and global
challenges. Examples include:
• Transparent and honest government. Trust among citizens in developing
countries is lower than in countries where stable and accountable legal and
regulatory structures engender better community and societal behaviours.
It takes a long time for people living in regions devastated by wars and
autocratic regimes to trust their governments and to be relatively free of
corruption. Accountability and assurance mechanisms (using block chains,
FIM and related capabilities), embedded in business processes, are vital
to ensure effective implementation and enforcement of laws, policies and
organisational structures.
• Tax evasion and money laundering. When the distribution curve of a
country’s wealth steepens excessively, money and asset ownership seeks
off-shore domiciles to conceal wealth, reducing financial liquidity in home
markets and thereby diminishing economic opportunity for those further down
the wealth distribution curve. Eventually, capital starvation can start to unseat
economies, followed by wide-scale youth unemployment that can scar lost

80
generations with a long-standing distrust in their leadership. This undermines
democracy, creating conditions for societal fracture, failed states, terrorism
and human misery. Again, accountability and assurance are required to tackle
these problems.
• Illegal trade and environmental vandalism. About 50% of marine species
have become extinct in the past 30 years, and the situation is similar on
land. Despite international efforts under the Convention on International
Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), the evidence
suggests we are heading towards the Earth’s sixth mass extinction. If we
are to have any hope of rescuing the global situation, we have to implement
much stronger detection and asset tracking mechanisms, with the same
accountability and assurance.
• Food fraud and supply chain disruption. The UK is more dependent on food
imports than ever before, and more vulnerable to national food denial than in
1917 or 1942. The food supply chain can be difficult to track — witness the
meat adulteration saga of 2013 (widely known as the ‘horsemeat scandal’),
CASE STUDY 2
Estonian block chains transform
paying, trading and signing
Alastair Brockbank, British Embassy Tallinn
Experimenting with block chain technology was a
logical step for Estonia. By providing a distributed
and unalterable ledger of information, it has ideal
qualities for the storage and management of
public keys. These are a form of encryption key,
provided by a designated authority, which can be
combined with a private key to effectively encrypt
messages and authenticate digital signatures.
Estonia now has the most regularly used national
Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in the world.
Moreover, as a decentralised solution, a block
chain is inherently more portable and scalable.
It is capable of computing vast amounts of data
every second and seamlessly working across
borders. For companies in a country of just 1.3
million people, block chains thus offer a way for
national solutions to more easily become global
solutions. Their computational power also makes
them faster, and in certain cases the technology
has the disruptive power to make existing
intermediaries redundant.
The three case studies below — profiling a bank,
a start-up and a cybersecurity provider — show
the transformative power of block chains for a
wide range of transactions. All three examples
underline that block chains must be made user-
friendly. The customer need not know that they
are trading in coloured coins, nor that their ID
card login uses hash-function cryptography. In
this sense, a block chain acts as a silent, more
efficient workhorse behind a solution that looks
familiar: a mobile payments app, an online
crowdfunding and trading platform, or a login
portal.
As in the UK, the need for and extent of regulation
is a key issue for the Estonian authorities. They
understand that hesitation and indecision can
be as damaging to innovation as strictness. The
risks of innovators moving to new and less tightly
regulated jurisdictions — specifically, the loss of
revenue from failing to capitalise on commercial
opportunities, and the potential for criminal
activity — are patently clear.

81
A pioneering bank issues
cryptocurrency securities
Earlier this year, LHV Pank — the largest
independent Estonian bank — became the
first bank in the world to experiment with
programmable money when it issued €100,000
worth of cryptographically-protected certificates
of deposits. The experiment followed the
establishment of a new LHV subsidiary, Cuber
Technology, focused exclusively on Bitcoin-based
digital securities. Cuber’s work comprises two
strands: CUBER securities and the Cuber Wallet.
CUBER (Cryptographic Universal Blockchain
Entered Receivable) securities are simply bank
certificates of deposits recorded in the Bitcoin
block chain. They are denominated in euros, may
pay interest and are suitable for various purposes
— as a store of value, medium of exchange, trust
and escrow services, and even for machine-
to-machine transactions, opening potential
applicability in the Internet of Things (IoT). LHV
views CUBER securities as the Lego building
block for their future financial innovation.
The Cuber Wallet is the first demonstration of
CUBER usability. It is a piece of software for
mobile phones, enabling instant and free peer-
to-peer euro transactions, and low cost instant
payments for merchants and consumers, using
underlying CUBER securities.
Users store their private keys on their smartphone
to enhance security and mobility. To protect
against server compromises, Cuber Wallet
decentralises trust from the server and makes
the users themselves the Bitcoin clients. The app
uses SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) — a
type of ‘thin client’ security — which means the
user never has a complete copy of every block
in the chain. Instead they download a smaller
amount of data, the ‘blockheaders’, which link
transactions to a place in the chain. This allows
them to see that a network node has accepted
the transaction, while blocks added after it further
confirm that the network has accepted it.
The wallet uses bitcoins as a data carrier, which
they ‘paint’ by adding unique markers to them.
This then represents a claim in fiat currency
against LHV Bank, as the entry into a database
represents a claim against the traditional bank
system. By using fiat currency, the wallet can be
used not just for personal transfers, but also for
retail payments — the merchant has to approve
this payment method just as they have to approve
credit cards. LHV is currently testing it in a few
physical locations, but anticipate wider utility in
online business, particularly for smaller payments.
The use of fiat currency undoubtedly makes
the app more user friendly. LHV asserts that the
underlying technology is the bank’s concern: the
user and merchant do not and should not need to
for example — and there are many opportunities for fraud. The international
and UK food supply chains have no choice but to follow best-in-class supply-
chain assurance from other sectors, in order to implement accountability and
granular traceability.
• Supply chain threats. As cybercrime and international intellectual property
theft increase (involving sums of more than $7 trillion globally), supply chains
are coming under increasing regulatory, market and societal pressures for
stronger assurance based on collaborative risk management, including
accountability and federated identity management.
Along with other advanced nations and international experts, the UK could
influence the Council of Europe, the World Bank, G20 and the UN to implement
block chains with strong authentication, to provide and enforce accountability
and assurance. The UK government cannot do this alone. Industry wants the
government to be part of an energetic national approach to achieve national
capability and first-mover advantage, collaborating with industry to ensure UK is
amongst global leaders.

82
CASE STUDY 2 (continued)
see, nor know, that Cuber uses Bitcoin.
Cuber’s open source code and application
program interface are available to third parties
online, inviting other cryptocurrency exchanges
and developers to tap into the technology. Both
LHV and its development partner, ChromaWay,
prefer to drive usable innovation with smaller
software developers and start-ups, rather than
large banks.
When pressed on their challenges, LHV is
clear: regulatory uncertainty risks killing Cuber’s
transformative power by severely limiting its
reach. The bank urges regulators to embrace
block chain technology and adapt, rather than run
scared from it.
On the face of it, being backed by a bank
affords Cuber huge advantages, because
transferring money from a conventional bank
account to a digital wallet (and back again) is
simplified. CUBER is technically still a security
— the foundation of bank trading — albeit with
decentralised record keeping. But in reality, being
a bank remains a regulatory obstacle, because
they are typically subject to more legal arbitrage
than new innovators. Similarly, EU Know Your
Customer (KYC) rules that require a face-to-face
meeting to create a bank account disadvantage
Cuber when other online payment services such
as TransferWise and Holvi only need a quick
online sign-up. If banks are to compete effectively
in this market, regulation will need to impose
no additional barriers to banks, nor reduce their
mobility to reach and recruit new users.
Admittedly, LHV is in an unusual position: an
‘innovation-friendly’ bank doing it themselves,
but whose forward progress is currently restricted
by regulatory uncertainty. With no positive
movement, Cuber will either have to be distanced
from LHV’s license and the advantages that being
tied to a bank bring, or look at moving outside
Europe to another jurisdiction.
Developing a simple, secure and legally compliant
bridge between crypto and traditional banking
continues to prove exceptionally challenging for
all players. But none are closer than LHV.
A liquid aftermarket for start-up
investments
The illiquidity of start-up investment is a common
complaint from angel investors and founders
alike. Backers typically need to part with at least
€10,000, and must often wait 5 or more years to
exit.
Funderbeam — a reputed business intelligence
platform for investors — may well have found
a solution to this problem: a block chain-based
investment marketplace, to buy and sell coloured
coin stakes in start-up syndicates.
Investors will soon be able to use Funderbeam’s
online platform to create an investment syndicate
for one or several start-ups. Investment can
be in any configuration, and there is no limit to
the size of a syndicate. A £100,000 stake could
comprise one lead investor and 99 backers
investing £1,000; a lead investor on £75,000 and
five backers on £5,000; or any other combination.
Similar to crowdfunding, this diminishes the
threshold to invest in start-ups.
What differentiates Funderbeam from the
crowdfunding alternatives is the issuance of
‘coloured coins’ representing syndicate members’
stakes, which can be instantly bought, sold, or
traded with other investors. This enables more
fluid management of investment portfolios, and
expedites financing for start-ups. The Bitcoin
block chain underpins the aftermarket, allowing
for fast, effective and transparent asset ownership
tracking.
Every syndicate is paired with a microfund. Once
a syndicate is complete, and the start-up is
funded, Funderbeam’s aftermarket uses coloured
coins to give all members of a syndicate a digital
representation of their share in that microfund,
which is immediately tradable. Backers can thus
sell their whole share, or a proportion of it, once
they have made a decent return or want to cut
their losses.
Flexibility for investors is not the only benefit the
block chain solution affords. Kaidi Ruusalepp,
CEO of Funderbeam, also points to the
efficiencies that a distributed ledger offers

83
through bypassing bureaucracy. “We don’t
need a business registry, central depository, or
another formal authority to confirm the integrity
of a transaction,” he says. “With the block chain,
every investment, every ownership change has a
secure, distributed audit trail.”
Jaan Tallinn, co-founder of Skype and an
investor in Funderbeam, lauds the additional
layer of security and verification it offers for
online transactions. By being decentralised
and unalterable, block chains can create more
transparency in the equity market, without
compromising anyone’s privacy.
Funderbeam’s offering — providing flexibility,
speed, security and transparency — shows how
distributed ledgers can provide an alternative but
wholly viable basis for small and medium-sized
enterprise (SME) financing to expand in the 21st
century.
The next generation of public-key
infrastructure
Since 2013, Estonian government registers —
including those hosting all citizen and business-
related information — have used Guardtime to
authenticate the data in its databases. Their
Keyless Signature Infrastructure (KSI) pairs
cryptographic ‘hash functions’ (see below)
with a distributed ledger, allowing the Estonian
government to guarantee a record of the state
of any component within the network and data
stores.
This is no small undertaking. Estonia has the most
regularly used national PKI in the world. Using
their ID card, citizens order prescriptions, vote,
bank online, review their children’s school records,
apply for state benefits, file their tax return, submit
planning applications, upload their will, apply to
serve in the armed forces, and fulfil around 3000
other functions. Entrepreneurs use the ID card
to file their annual reports, issue shareholder
documents, apply for licenses, and so on.
Government officials use the ID card to encrypt
documents for secure communication, review and
approve permits, contracts and applications, and
submit information requests to law enforcement
agencies. Ministers even use their ID cards
to prepare for and conduct cabinet meetings,
allowing them to review agendas, submit
positions and objections, and review minutes.
Digital authentication is thus critical to
government, business and public services alike,
from drafting policy and legislation, to declaring
finances and registering property and inheritance
rights. Over 200 million digital signatures have
been made using the ID card: some 39 per capita
per year and rising. It is thus imperative for the
government to know its records are the right
records, and that they have not been altered from
the inside, or by a cyber attack.
So how does a block chain help? It helps
because every alteration of a piece of data is
recorded. By providing proof of time, identity
and authenticity, KSI signatures offer data
integrity, backdating protection and verifiable
guarantees that data has not been tampered
with. It is transparent and works to the user’s
benefit too: citizens can see who reviewed their
data, why, and when; and any alterations to their
personal data must be authorised. Moreover,
through using hash functions, as opposed to
asymmetric cryptography used in most PKI, KSI
cannot be broken by quantum algorithms. It is
also so scalable that it can sign an exabyte of
data per second using negligible computational
and network overhead. It removes the need for a
trusted authority, its signed data can be verified
across geographies, and it never compromises
privacy because it does not ingest customer
data. It is clear that the system marks a major
advancement in PKI.
Ultimately, the KSI block chain means that while
the Estonian ID Card may never be immune to a
breach (although there have been none so far), the
government is assured that rogue alterations to
public data will be 100% detectable.

84
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87
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank the many contributors for the support they have provided to
this review – Sir Mark Walport, Government Chief Scientific Adviser.
The expert panel for their guidance and drafting of the evidence papers:
Robleh Ali Bank of England
Richard Brown R3
Patrick Curry British Business Federation Authority
Richard Copland CGI Group
Dr Phil Godsiff University of Surrey
Mike Halsall Singularity University/ Almanis
Derwen Hinds CESG
Matthew Johnson Guardtime
Dominic Hobson COOConnect
Dr Vili Lehdonvirta Oxford University
Jonathan Levin Chainalysis
Dr Catherine Mulligan Imperial College London / Future Cities Catapult
Professor M. Angela Sasse University College London
Dr Chris Sier FiNexus
Daniel Shiu GCHQ
Simon Taylor Barclays
Additional contributions and advice from
Hadley Beeman GDS
Dr John Baird EPSRC
Alastair Brockbank British Embassy Tallinn, Estonia
Dr George Danezis University College London
Shaul David UKTI
Nick Davies DWP
Igor Nai Fovino Joint Research Centre, European Commission
Leanne Kemp Everledger
Dr Sarah Meiklejohn University College London
Jean-Pierre Nordvik Joint Research Centre, European Commission
Tom Price BIS
Thomas Wilkinson Home Office
Naomi Wright HMRC
The review team for their support and synthesis of the evidence papers
Dr Claire Craig GO-Science
Martin Glasspool GO-Science
Emma Griffiths GO-Science
Elizabeth Surkovic GO-Science
Editor
Dr Mark Peplow

© Crown copyright 2016
This publication is licensed under the terms of the Open Government Licence
v3.0 except where otherwise stated. To view this licence, visit
nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or write to
the Information Policy Team, The National Archives, Kew, London TW9 4DU, or
email: psi@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk.
Where we have identified any third party copyright information you will need to
obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned.
This publication available from www.gov.uk/go-science
Contacts us if you have any enquiries about this publication, including requests
for alternative formats, at:
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GS/16/1
Design and Production: WordLink

Distributed ledger technology: beyond block chain

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