The COVID-19 pandemic has brought most startups to a standstill, but numerous startups were able to overcome the immediate impact to their operations and focus on providing their service to relieve the local or global community from this emerging situation.
So far, the Portuguese startup ecosystem has been the first to organize a coordinated support with more than 120 startups with 2,000 employees engaging around this cause. The network has facilitated a dozen of projects, while there are many communities replicating this coordinated response in their local ecosystems.
While there has been a tremendous support from leading blockchain companies in the form of multimillion donations, to free services, or supporting by enhanced hiring in a period that unemployment is hitting new records globally, this post aims to explore only use cases which utilize blockchain as underlying technology to embrace solutions against the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Supply Chain Transparency
Dutch blockchain startup, Tymlez, will develop a platform to model the medical goods ecosystem through a platform that matches supply and demand, ensuring transparency across the supply chain — preventing predatory value extraction, such as price gouging, amid the coronavirus pandemic, according to CoinTelegraph.
Privacy Focused Pandemic Tracking
Tor Bair’s Enigma, a data encryption firm, has developed a platform to facilitate privacy-preserving contact tracing for COVID-19. As observed by some nations – like South Korea or Singapore – ability to “flatten the curve,” fighting a pandemic requires reams of data. This comes both from wide-spread testing, as well detailed maps of infected persons movements. SafeTrace lets users share sensitive location and health data with other users and officials, without compromising the privacy of that data. This service enables users to safely and privately share location data and their infection status. The objective of this tool is to help track social infection vectors.
Mutual Insurance
Ant Financial’s online mutual aid platform Xiang Hu Ba rely on blockchain to fast track claims payout amid coronavirus outbreak according to South China Morning Post. The platform has a userbase of approximately 10,000 users. The coronavirus payout will be funded with Ant Financial’s own capital and is separate from the 300,000 yuan maximum payout Xiang Hu Bao participants are entitled to for another 100 critical illnesses.
MIT Privacy Tracker
Governments need accurate information related to how the virus has been transmitted interpersonally. Both China and Israel, have turned to using GPS data collected by their citizens’ mobile phones to identify people who have crossed paths with an infected individual. The Private Kit which consists of epidemiologists, engineers, and data scientists – led by MIT Media Lab Professor Ramesh Raskar – built a free, privacy-protecting app that can be used to track the spread of COVID-19, using mobile phones.
Contactless international transactions
There are no introductions needed in regard to the capability of blockchain to facilitate contractless international lightspeed transactions with minimal fees.
Other initiatives
ADAIA, the Decentralized AI Alliance, launches #COVIDathon, the first Decentralized AI hackathon to support the medical community with solutions against COVID-19.
The COVIDathon, hosted on DevPost, will officially start on April 1st and submissions will be open until June 1st. The hackathon features four distinct tracks:
● Data Privacy and Sovereignty
● Medicine and Epidemiology
● Informational and Coping Tools
● Open Innovation
More information is available here: https://daia.foundation/covidathon/
Our response to Coronavirus
As outlined in our Business Continuity Governance, INTRASOFT International has been early to adapt remote work, along with numerous initiatives to guarantee undisrupted continuity of our operations, while guaranteeing the safety of our employees and of our partners.
Independent of our company-wise actions, our New Ventures department which consists of Excellence centers in the domains of Blockchain, Big Data, Machine Learning, and other emerging technologies, will proactively participate with intergovernmental organisations to provide our technical and business capacity to help tackle the Pandemic.
Initiatives we are following or contributing:
The World Health Organization needs mobile app developers to work on an app to help contain and mitigate the spread of Coronavirus (COVID-19). The organization has extended a call to mobile app developers to rapidly iterate the app to newer versions to better respond to the pandemic.
We are actively participating in numerous hackathons to identify technological solutions to support with the coronavirus tracking, relief, or even future case studies which will help governments and international organizations to prevent such large-scale pandemic.
If you are a startup, an individual, or a corporation that looking to share your idea looking for technical support to materialize a solution against COVID-19 we invite you to contact our New Ventures team and take action together!
Author: Nikolaos Kostopoulos.