Six weeks after the launch of BelYo, the country’s first blockchain platform to track Covid-19 patients, global blockchain start-up BelfricsBT has launched a blockchain-based DigiLocker app – BELshare – for both Android and iOS.
Personal data
BELshare helps users to share their personal data and digitised Covid-19 and vaccine health records in a secure manner. It can be used by all organisations, merchants, residential and commercial premisesto manage visitors’ data by using a QR code to scan the personal date in the app.
“With BelYo, we have already provided institutions a very cost-effective way of issuing the digital certificates on the blockchain. Now, with BELshare, we have eased out the user-side solution for storage and sharing of the issued digital certificate,” Praveen Kumar, founder and CEO, BelfricsBT, told BusinessLine.
“Collecting authentic data to assist in tracking Covid-19 cases across a densely populated country like India is a difficult task for regulatory bodies and the government. A two-way digital communication between healthcare systems and the general public is the need of the hour to manage the daily rise in Covid-19 cases in India. BELshare can help fast track the entire tracking process by enabling users to store digitised health records using our Belrium blockchain platform and share them in a safe and secured manner,” he said.
Apart from health records, users would also get the option of digitising other vital information such as personal documents, social security details, educational certificates, financial statements and child’s vaccination records. By simply using the QR code, users could then share these documents with the merchants in a seamless and secured manner.
Asked how the BELshare DigiLocker is different from existing DigiLockers in the market, Kumar said: “Existing DigiLockers are centralised systems, whereyou are provided access to digital storage and yet you do not own these records. The capability for users to share and authenticate these records to a third party is very limited. As against that, what a decentralised application (DaPP) does is that it provides a copy of the certificate/claim to the user wallet, which is fully owned and controlled by the user, who has the liberty to share these with anyone who wants to verify the documents or claims. This takes away the complex issue of data privacy and data sharing requirement from the institutional side.”
Target
The company is also focussing on residential as well as corporate premises to onboard BELshare to ease out their visitor management processes by enabling them to record and digitise visitor data instantly. This data could be further integrated with third party clinical data to track all the possible Covid-19 cases in the premises and to safeguard it from becoming a possible Covid-19 hotspot.
“We are looking at an annual turnover of ₹120 crore from our merchants’ app alone from the Indian market,” said Kumar. BELshare enables merchants, including offices, shops, malls, salons and theatres to get access to quantitative insights about all visitors entering their premises by simply scanning the QR code on the visitors’ app. “While the app is absolutely free for the users, we have introduced an extremely affordable subscription pack for our merchant’s app. Merchants could access all the services of BELshare at less than ₹0.70 per visitor data. We are looking at onboarding 10 lakh merchants across India by 2021, and are looking at generating $260 million from India and other key global markets” added Kumar.
Blockchain technology and decentralised application is expected to accelerate the digitisation process of document issuers as the process does not involve radical changes to their existing systems. The issuers will only have to issue a digital copy to the user’s wallet, in addition to the existing process that is being carried out.