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During the India Blockchain Forum Launch event, Telangana’s principal secretary, department of the Industries & Commerce (I&C) and Information Technology (IT), Jayesh Ranjan, announced plans to launch a Web3.0 Regulatory Sandbox to help build and promote web3.0, startups, innovation, technology and ecosystem in the state.

Announcing the launch, Ranjan said. “In order to help in clearing the confusion and ambiguity around Web3.0, we are setting up a regulatory sandbox on web 3.0.”

The Sandbox will help the shortlisted startups in various ways such as providing governed data access and domain knowledge experts. Further, the composition of this regulatory sandbox and governance structures that will delve into questions like what will be delivered, what will be called for, will be discussed in a larger forum, and will incorporate their inputs and suggestions, said Ranjan.

The Sandbox aims to address the issues and challenges faced by the web3 startups, particularly in the areas of DeFi, Metaverse and Web3.0.

Ranjan did not announce the exact time frame for the Sandbox.

India Blockchain Forum Launched Formally

So far, known as an informal group in the blockchain lane of India, Ranjan officially launched India Blockchain Forum.

Founded by Prasanna Lohar, CEO, Block Stack; Pankaj Diwan, Founder & CEO, Idealabs FutureTech Ventures; Col Inderjit Singh, chief cyber security officer, Vara Technologies; Sharat Chandra, blockchain evangelist and Srinivas Mahankali, chief business officer, Secure Kloud Technologies, the Forum envisages a collaboration model with governments, regulators, Industry and academia.

The aim is to help build a holistic framework for the right adoption of blockchain and web3.0. It will also create community chapters across the country to increase awareness and access to global best practices.

The forum has created a comprehensive ten-point agenda and will serve as a unified platform for:

1. Build India Blockchain Stack
2. Policy advocacy
3. Accelerate startup Ecosystem
4. Support blockchain Technology companies
5. Create a Talent pool for sustainable growth of the blockchain ecosystem.
6. Collaborate with Academia and Research institutes
7. India Blockchain Use Case Repository
8. Handhold corporates to adopt web3.0 technologies
9. Nurture Communities
10. Global Collaboration

The forum currently has more than 40 key influencers and is setting up Special Interest Groups (SIGs) in areas such as CBDC, metaverse and policy framework for effective blockchain adoption.

GMR Group Sets Up Blockchain Centre Of Excellence

In line with the Telangana government’s announcement of making Hyderabad a Blockchain district which would have a Centre of Excellence, an incubation centre and more in 2018,  the principal secretary Ranjan has now unveiled GMR Group’s blockchain Centre of Excellence.

A day before the Web3.0 Regulatory Sandbox announcement, Ranjan, while launching the CoE mentioned that the Telangana government relies heavily on blockchain.

“We have not published it much, but we have been able to demonstrate some very successfully use cases such as home-based voting, or say remote voting. In India, remote voting is still a kind of a fairy tale and you can imagine the context in which voting takes place in our country where even EVMs are doubted. Blockchain can solve this particular issue of the lack of trust in an efficient manner,” he said.

Telangana is also the first state to move the entire messy and complicated system of chit funds on blockchain. Otherwise, chit fund scams are happening everywhere. Such opportunities thus make this CoE even more exciting because as all of us know, the airport itself is like a universe where all kinds of transactions happen. There are umpteen opportunities of finding problems, where blockchain can be a very appropriate technology, solve them within the airport, and then obviously try it out in the larger world as well, Ranjan added.

India’s Infrastructure major GMR Group’s innovation vertical GMR Innovex has launched the Blockchain Centre of Excellence to identify and explore blockchain use cases in aviation and ancillary industries. The company has also announced plans to launch the next centre of excellence in robotics in the next quarter.

For setting up the blockchain CoE, GMR Innovex has partnered with a slew of blockchain companies and organisations. This includes Ethereum sidechain (L2) Polygon, KoineArth, India Blockchain Forum and Veroince.

Speaking about the CoE, SGK Kishore, executive director, South Airports and CIO GMR Group said, “Primarily, when we started looking into innovation because Hyderabad airport has been in the forefront of deploying new technologies, we were the first airport to deploy paperless boarding. Now we are in the forefront of deploying facial recognition, Digi Yatra in our airport ecosystems. So, we thought there is a huge opportunity to give a platform for various stakeholders to try out new things, try out new ideas, new solutions, new products. And that is how last year when we launched this GMR Innovex open innovation platform.”

It provides a unique opportunity to both the internal and external stakeholders to work with the businesses, especially the startups who face a challenge in getting access to the end users, he added.

On how Blockchain would help GMR in fulfilling its airport operation, Kishore explained that it is not just transportation, but it will also help fix logistics, safety and security-related issues. It has stakeholders who are quasi-government or purely private.

With such a multi-party and multi-layer operation, the aviation sector has a multi-stakeholder environment, where a lot of data and information exchange happens, and a lot of time is spent on ensuring that the data which is transferred from one party to the other is accurate.

This is where blockchain technology naturally fits into the requirements. The CoE will explore Blockchain use cases, and identify opportunities to leverage this technology.