Blockchain landing in philanthropy, alliance builds to test entrants' capabilities

Source: China Business News

In the field of public welfare and charity, how to more quickly connect with the need for help? How to maximize the power of upstream and downstream industries to participate in prevention and control work? In the digital context, technology companies have submitted their own answers to this question.

It is understood that many institutions such as Ant Financial, JD.com, Xiamen International Bank, Hangzhou Funchain Technology Co., Ltd. (hereinafter referred to as “Funchain Technology”) are exploring the application of charity + blockchain, hoping to solve the informatization of public welfare institutions Large gaps cannot meet the public's contradiction of transparency requirements.

Regarding the reasons for the focus of this model and the role of blockchain in it, Zheng Lei, deputy dean of the International New Economic Research Institute and a distinguished expert at the Bay Area International Financial Technology Laboratory, told the China Business Daily that with the continuous development of society As the quality of the people continues to improve, the demand for charitable activities is increasing, and the demand for public welfare transparency is also increasing. "Blockchain technology can disclose donation and distribution data to donors, charity platforms and recipients at the same time, so that each donation can be quickly matched and verified."

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Increase in incoming players

"Donors, philanthropic platforms, and grantees in the (traditional) philanthropic chain cannot verify each other. The labor costs required for information disclosure are precisely the important factors that hinder public welfare organizations from increasing transparency." Zheng Lei admitted.

In the context of the dilemma, the public has focused its attention on the emerging technology-blockchain.

FunChain Technology told reporters that in its charity donation traceability platform "Good Track" based on blockchain technology,

"The platform has now opened the whole process of charitable donation of 'seeking donation-donation docking-issue donation-logistics tracking-donation confirmation'. With this platform, demanders can realize more convenient and quick demand information release; donors donate materials and Technically ensure the authenticity of the information on the chain; the general public can also participate in the entire process of monitoring and querying donation information. At the same time, the Hangzhou Internet Notary Office in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province will provide corresponding notarization services for this platform, and take effective precautions by legal means. Dishonest donations, etc. "

Wang Pengju, chief information officer of Xiamen International Bank, said,

"In 2019, we cooperated with the Xiamen Charity Federation to build a 'philanthropy charity sunshine chain platform'. This platform uses the blockchain's traceable traceability technology. With the open, transparent, immutable, and traceable features of the blockchain, Users' donation information and donation assistance information are all recorded on the blockchain. Donors can log in to the platform at any time to query the flow and use of donated funds in real time, and clarify the whereabouts of their donations. "

The reporter learned from Alipay that it has recently launched an epidemic prevention material information service platform. The platform is led by the Zhejiang Provincial Health and Construction Commission and the Economic and Information Bureau. It uses ant blockchain technology to review and analyze the information on the demand, supply, and transportation of materials. Deposit certificate on the chain. At the same time, Alipay also provides blockchain program power for free and special fund support to developers of epidemic-related applets.

According to Alipay, the product logic of the aforementioned material platform is to collect the demand information of demand parties such as hospitals through nails. After level-by-level review, it is determined by the Information Commission and uploaded to the chain to store certificates. Information disclosure, but also docking the two supply sides of local production channels and online donation channels.

JD Charity has been using Internet technology in material donation since 2017 to change the traditional material donation model. JD Philanthropy stated that the “material-to-love” material donation platform fully combines JD's advantages in supply chain, logistics, technology and other aspects to achieve openness, transparency and traceability throughout the process. Donors can see the material needs of the recipients through their platform, place an order with one click, and JD Logistics will deliver them to the non-profit organization for free. The whole process has shortened the process of picking goods, comparing prices, bidding, and distribution after the public welfare institutions got the money. It has also improved the efficiency of donations and reduced the implementation costs of public welfare projects.

Mobilizing participation is key

Although there are many attempts and partial landings in the field of charity + blockchain, there is still a long way to go for large-scale applications.

Zhang Xiaojun, director of Huawei's blockchain project, told reporters that, from a technical perspective, the difficulty of blockchain charity fundraising is relatively low. The obstacle to landing lies in the ability of the operator and the (participant) willingness to share data. "In the current situation, (data sharing) obstacles are easy to solve, mainly due to the operator's capabilities."

JD Philanthropy stated that, regardless of whether it is the competent government department, public welfare organization, or hundreds of thousands of partners in the JD system, they are exploring the public welfare model in a more open form.

"At present, the biggest challenge is that on the one hand, Internet philanthropy platforms must meet the needs of philanthropic organizations, and at the same time bear the responsibility to empower the development of the entire public welfare ecosystem. The platform needs to strategically unite philanthropic organizations, governments, academic and research institutions, Consumers and business partners pay proactive attention to social and environmental issues and help provide solutions to social and environmental issues. "

Sun Haitao, the technical director of the Hang Seng Electronic Blockchain, bluntly stated that although the core logic of the blockchain is decentralized, in the context of the alliance chain, because it is necessary to attract all parties to actively join, so that all parties are willing to jointly become each node in the alliance chain, so There are still potential requirements for conditions such as the credibility of the alliance sponsors and the ability to coordinate resources. At present, the improvement of the alliance ecology still has a certain degree of connection with the initiator's subjective capabilities.

Taking the charity cloud platform service that Xiamen International Bank is planning to launch as an example, it hopes to integrate the charity blockchain platform through the established intelligent payment cloud platform to provide donation cloud platform solutions for charities and foundations. Wang Pengju said that in seeking to invite charities to participate, Xiamen International Bank has launched various branches to conduct in-depth understanding of charities and charitable foundations within the operating area, especially the charitable donations and management models of charities. (And) actively demonstrate the blockchain public welfare charity cloud platform to some charities by remote means to help them understand the business model of the blockchain public welfare platform.

At the same time, the reporter noted that the industry believes that the data on the blockchain + charity will affect efficiency. Is this the case in practice?

In this regard, Wang Pengju said that data classification and processing through the smart contract layer can save communication resources and improve processing performance, and the system delay can be effectively controlled at the millisecond level. In addition, using the scalability of the blockchain, newly-joined partners can deploy blockchain nodes locally, improving the efficiency of data query processing. Therefore, the data on-chain will speed up the collection of donation funds and automatic statistics and accurate feedback of fund utilization information, reducing the time and error opportunities required for manual statistics and operations. From this perspective, the possibility of affecting donation efficiency is relatively small.

Zheng Lei believes that philanthropy is actually a complete ecology. Blockchain technology requires the existing organizations participating in philanthropy to be chained. It is itself a platform for various stakeholders. The low willingness of interested parties to participate is related to the trust crisis that has always existed in philanthropy. The introduction of blockchain technology, although it puts forward some additional requirements in terms of informatization, is able to fundamentally solve the important issues of transparent and traceable processes and rebuild public trust in charities. It is an active attempt. "Based on the principle of maximizing transparency, the qualification requirements of participants can also be appropriately reduced, so that charity can become a public good that everyone can participate in, and it can also provide society with more choices and a competitive environment for the fittest."

Chen Wen, deputy director of the Inclusive Finance and Intelligent Finance Research Center of the School of Finance at Southwestern University of Finance and Economics, also holds a similar view. "The real 'blockchain + charity' to achieve operational effects that are different from traditional charities depends on the majority The embarrassment of the moment is that the participants are generally still in a state of no sense, so 'blockchain + charity' currently does not truly reflect higher efficiency and social value. "

At the same time, Chen Wen said that the highlight of building a well-functioning charity ecosystem based on blockchain is to give full play to the strength of the masses, and it is possible to form a comprehensive and three-dimensional social supervision and cultural environment, but the difficulty is Incentives for participating in donations and monitoring donations are essential.

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