Seven blockchain projects specialising in everything from diamond trade to health records and promotion of tourism have been presented at today’s conference held by Dubai's Global Blockchain Council.

Participants of Keynote 2016, the blockchain conference taking place at the Burj Al Arab in Dubai, believe that distributed ledger can be put to many uses, as reported by Gulf Business and CoinDesk. Seven new solutions were proposed by both international and UAE-based companies.

Dubai Multi Commodities Centre (DMCC), one of the greatest diamond traders in the world, announced a project of digitising Kimberley certificates, the documents set up “to ensure that diamond purchases were not financing violence by rebel movements and their allies seeking to undermine legitimate governments.” Once all the data from around the world is put in a blockchain, it would be easier to control the diamond trade.

The local telecom provider du, one of the largest in the UAE, said it works in partnership with Estonian company Guardime on a project to increase the security and accessibility of national health records by putting them in a distributed ledger. The idea is to give medical personal access to up-to-date patient profiles and reduce paperwork.

Similar motives guide another project presented by local cryptocurrency startup BitOasis. Its goal is to simplify the process of establishing business companies in Dubai. According to BitOasis, if a great deal of papers needed to get a license could be digitised and put into a blockchain, it would streamline the process. BitOasis has rеcently received an undisclosed sum of seed funding from New York and Dubai-based blockchain companies.

Blockchain company Loyyal (formerly Ribbit.me) announced Dubai Points, a project of tourism encouragement. The idea is to turn the visit of Dubai (the fourth most visited city in the world) into some sort of a quest game: tourists would be stimulated to visit certain places to earn points they could later spend in other locations in Dubai.

The project proposed by Dubai International Financial Centre provides for digital wills. Currently, according to the presenter, issues of inheritance in the country often result in failure of family-owned businesses. Blockchain-based wills could reduce the time and the efforts required to enter into possession of inherited assets.

Victor Koenig LLC proposed a project enabling those who deal in illiquid physical assets to digitise them, put into distributed ledger with the help of special tokens and trade them using smart contracts. Finally, IBM plans to use blockchain to digitise trade flows in order to improve the shipment of the goods.

The Global Blockchain Council was launched in February 2016 by the Dubai’s Museum of the Future Foundation. The 32 members of the Council include international IT companies, governmental entities, important regional banks and blockchain firms.

The Museum of the Future Foundation was created by Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Emir of Dubai. The Museum itself is scheduled to be open in December 2018.

Alexey Tereshchenko