More and more Governments are investigating how the use of blockchain technology might improve some of their public operations. Argentina just published its blockchain national guidelines.

The paper, which was released on December 7, also establishes a national blockchain committee, which will be responsible for “acting as an interlocutor in the local blockchain ecosystem, promoting the interoperability of blockchain technology and good governance.”

The Public Innovation Secretariat and other state agencies will form the group, which will create blockchain-based public policy and technology solutions. However, the additional organizations requested to serve on the committee are not included in the framework.

The Government framework outlines many applications for blockchain technology in supporting state-exclusive operations. Given the scale and extent of various governmental systems, the first area where it is expected to be useful is auditing. Blockchain is described as a component that will serve two purposes in this regard: assisting individuals in understanding how the state invests public cash and centralizing all public activities into a single framework.

The second area concerns citizen identity. The Argentine government believes that blockchain technology might help with identifying operations by preventing forgeries of IDs and other government papers. Creating a system based on blockchain would provide third parties with simple methods of verifying.

There are already projects using blockchain for this purpose. The city of Buenos Aires is now building a system called Tangoid, which is expected to be operational in January as part of a digitalization drive. The city will also host Ethereum nodes as part of an effort to better understand the cryptocurrency’s inner workings for regulatory purposes.