TL;DR We will be building to enable new use cases, not client sales at first. If you buy our NFT it may take time to recuperate your investment, there is a small chance you may never recover the value invested but we are making sure that you have an incredible piece of art to counter this risk.
The Blxckout or ‘Blockout’ approach to building is laser focused on the long term goal of moving traditional, inefficient and process heavy government operations onto web3.
To get to this point there will be many significant building blocks required — including but not limited to; a massive shift in perception from central and local govt’s, a continued on-ramp of crypto adoption by non ‘crypto degens’ and many on chain innovations such as a strong privacy layer, chain native storage solutions and a general uplift of maturity in the technologies integrity and availability to meet government service level agreements.
Misperceptions of Crypto Blockchains and Solana
In our opinion, to view Solana as a purely financial instrument or digital asset is wrong. Solana is much more than this, our friends at GenesysGO put it quite neatly:
‘The Solana network is largely misunderstood in terms of what it was built to achieve. By understanding what it truly means to be the world’s most performant state machine you realise that Solana can be used to reach consensus and maintain state on nearly anything.’
There is a mindset shift required from many day to day general technologists not involved or interested in the crypto world to see Solana for what it really is, a decentralised infrastructure layer similar to AWS, Azure or GCP not an equivalent to a digital currency.
The reason most payment systems will never utilise Solana’s native token is because to put it quite frankly 1 Solana does not = 1 Solana. At the exact time of writing this article 1 Solana currently = $53.27 or £43.43 to my native Britains. This is pretty simple, but some people still don’t get it.
I get that it’s an Infrastructure Layer, how will we identify new use cases?
At Blxckout we are dedicating most of our time at the moment to identify initial use cases and areas of value where Blxckout can move data on-chain and help to remove the barriers between Public Sector and Public blockchains.
We have currently mapped the full A-Z list of API’s and open datasets available from the UK government into a table and working to understand the benefits of transitioning this data on-chain and any downstream use cases that could be enabled. Each dataset is being evaluated across six areas of consideration:
- Data Format: Is the data in an easily digestable format for people to use? Is the data from legacy systems in a hard to reuse format, limiting value creation? Excel, CSV, JSON, etc.
- On-Chain Justification: What actual benefits would come about from moving this data on-chain vs using any traditional web2 method? Distributed Ownership? Interoperable Identity? Global Contract Execution?
- Use Cases: A comprehensive list of the use cases that could be enabled from each dataset. (We have been using existing systems that the data comes from to inspire us. We are contemplating opening a working copy of datasets up to our discord to crowdsource domain specific knowledge, as at the moment the list of use cases per API is limited by the collective ability of our team. With vast areas up for discussion across the full breadth of running a country, we think all builders in the ecosystem should be a part of this process.)
- Predicted Business Value: Is there some form of business value that could be created if the use case was performed using a web3 protocol approach in comparison to more traditional platform approach? e.g. Will there be less overhead for staffing? Increased speed to value? Cost savings? Open source benefits?
- Predicted Societal Value: Will there be efficiency gains for public sector that provide inherent benefits to the general public? Will an API and it’s associated downstream use cases provide a better customer experience for the general public? Would it increase risk to the general public being run with a web3 approach? Would the use cases being built displace existing jobs?
- Client Profiles: Finally, once we have identified and thought about all of the above factors and their consequences we look to identify builders in the space that will be able to make use of our data feeds. We’re also strikingly aware that as we’re early there may be simply no Solana builders in that domain. In the case that we identify a new dataset and applicable use case for web3 that has large total addressable market and suits our business profile, we will also build dApps to meet those use cases ourselves.
Preliminary use case examples
To demonstrate some of the use cases we’ve found through our initial scan, we will use the domain areas used by the UK government.
For today’s article we will run through two domains and give an indicative examples of datasets, their associated use cases and how they could impact Public Sector spending and increase both business and society productivity:
Business & Economy:
Dataset: GOV.UK Trade Tariff API - makes it easy to access UK Trade Tariff data from the trade tariff service. The data includes commodity codes, import/export controls, customs duty and VAT rates. It is accessed via HTTPS and returns data in a JSON format. The reference documentation provides a thorough overview of the endpoints and the response format.
What is it: Details on when a specific restriction on the value or volume of exports of a specified good imposed by government of the exporting country. This restraint may be intended to protect domestic producers from temporary shortages of certain materials, or as means to moderate world prices of specified commodities. Commodity agreements sometimes contain explicit provisions to indicate when export quotas should go into effect among producers. Export quotas are also used in connection with orderly marketing and voluntary restraint agreements.
Use case: Precisely track the provenance of export quotas, transparently and immutably to prevent fraud, ensure safety and continued market health. Globally execute contracts in an automated manner and provide one single source of truth for UK Govt to communicate with other nation states.
Environment:
Dataset: Environment Agency - The Water Quality Archive provides data on water quality measurements carried out by the Environment Agency. The archive provides data on these measurements and samples dating from 2000 to present day. It contains 58 million measurements on nearly 4 million samples from 58 thousand sampling points.
What is it: The Water Quality Archive provides data on water quality measurements. Samples are taken at sampling points around England and can be from coastal or estuarine waters, rivers, lakes, ponds, canals or groundwaters. They are taken for a number of purposes including compliance assessment against discharge permits, investigation of pollution incidents or environmental monitoring. The archive provides data on measurements and samples dating from 2000.
Use case: Precisely and immutably store the quality of water as sensors and samples are updated, incentivise local authorities and private land owners to maintain water quality with crypto payments, automate compliance penalties with smart contracts.
Passing Comments
At Blxckout we genuinely believe that most of the true use cases for public blockchains aren’t here yet. If you take the example of geolocation technology in mobile, about 5–6 years ago everyone was talking about how you’d have geolocation based advertising e.g you’d walk past McDonald’s they’d send you an advert for a 99p cheeseburger.
In actual fact still there’s barely any companies using geolocation for advertising, instead it is used for mobility companies (more obvious in hindsight) by companies like Uber & Lyft. Though we’re not massive Mark Cuban fanboys at the Blxckout team, a post he recently put out resonated with us heavily:
‘We don’t need NFTs or DeFi on every chain. We don’t need bridges to move NFTs between chains (does this make it fungible?). We need Smart Contract apps replacing SAAS apps.’
