Caroline Malcolm heads the Global Blockchain Policy Centre at the OECD,  assessing its policy implications & building solutions to ensure governments across the world can access and respond to the opportunities and challenges it raises.

In this podcast she discusses with us the interesting work the OECD is doing around understanding the potential blockchain can bring to the its members, how they collaborate with other international institutions and she also invites you all to participate in the upcoming OECD Global Blockchain Policy Forum 2020 .

 

What is blockchain?

Caroline agrees that there is a wide range of views regarding defining what is blockchain.

For the OECD, blockchain is just one type of distributed ledger technology (DLT) and refers itself to a combination of technologies. These technologies create a digital, shared and self-updating ledger of verified transactions or information amongst parties on a network. These blockchains and DLTs more broadly use various types of consensus mechanisms to validate and record those transactions or transfer of information.

They have various governance systems with various degrees of control for the different parties on the network. Blockchain applications have been developed across lots of different sectors, and is often described as the Internet of value.

 

What is the OECD?

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is an international organisation that works to build better policies for better lives. Their goal is to shape policies that foster prosperity, equality, opportunity and well-being for all.

The OECD is an international organisation with at the present moment 37 members, including Colombia who recently joined. Together with governments, policy makers and citizens, the OECD works on establishing evidence-based international standards and finding solutions to a range of social, economic and environmental challenges. From improving economic performance and creating jobs, to fostering strong education, informing the impact of emerging technologies such as AI and blockchain, to fighting international tax evasion, they provide a unique forum and knowledge hub for data and analysis, exchange of experiences, best-practice sharing, and advice on public policies and international standard-setting.

 

The OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre

For the last 6 years the OECD has been looking at cryptocurrencies and their impacts and potential for financial markets. In 2017, the OECD launched a project called Going Digital which broadly looked at digitalization across the policy spectrum. Within 18 months of that project being underway the OECD members decided that going forward they would put their focus on artificial intelligence and on blockchain.

In 2018 the OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre was created and in 2019 the OECD AI Policy Observatory was created.

The OECD Global Blockchain Policy Centre was created to support governments to address the challenges raised by DLT and their applications as well as to seize the opportunities it offers for achieving policy objectives.  The Centre focuses a significant amount of effort on education – capacity building and focusing on what...