Special Interview: Factom CEO Peter Kirby on blockchain initiatives in China

It’s no secret that China is the world’s second largest economy. In 2008, China became the country with the most Internet users in the world. Now, as this Asian giant rapidly rises, innovative technologies are being adopted to enhance the country’s economic infrastructure.

Factom is an Austin, Texas-based company at the center of the blockchain movement. Factom’s cutting-edge solutions provide government and corporate stakeholders with a way to facilitate large-scale data transactions in a way that is secure, auditable, verifiable, and tamper-proof. The company’s blockchain solution is able to secure the data of large public and private entities by establishing a unique encrypted data placeholder and combining it with Factom’s immutable distributed ledger. This data is then confirmed through a “proof of existence” model that will be able to aggregate all future transactions.

"The company's name Factom comes from the Latin word Factom, which means 'statement and determination of things'."

The potential benefits of this new technology to China’s economic success are immeasurable. From process efficiencies to massive cost savings, blockchain innovations offer ways to effectively manage the exponentially growing digital data that is at the core of the nation’s economic, social, technological, and cultural fabric.

According to Peter Kirby, co-founder and CEO of Factom, the key theme underpinning China’s interest in blockchain is very much intact. “What’s really interesting about China is that their billion-plus population has a hard time trusting each other. In particular, they find it hard to trust contracts and the court system. That’s the core of the problem.”

Kirby said in an interview with BTCMANAGER that the beauty of the Factom model is that it integrates all systems through a blockchain backend that allows for a permanent and immutable audit trail of data. In this way, countries like China can realize a new method of accountability and a tamper-proof data repository. However, until now, this type of repository has been easily tampered by any number of third-party interest groups.

Two bold applications of blockchain technology

In order to better manage cities and large-scale urban landscapes in the long term, the Chinese government has agreed to work with Factom and consulting partner ISoftStone to promote a comprehensive "smart city" initiative through the application of blockchain distributed ledger technology. The plan is based around a carefully planned strategy to establish a new repository, audit and verify service infrastructure to meet the country's continued development drive.

"I think of a smart city as a collection of sensors. The challenge for countries like China is how to prove that the data from the sensors has not changed somewhere along the way. So in a sense, the purpose of this initiative is to provide an audit trail for the sensors. In other words, how do you prove that the pollution data collected is correct or the traffic data is correct. - Peter Kirby"

In line with this, Factom and Chinese electronic data notarization service company Ancun Zhengxin recently announced a second collaboration. Factom will provide consulting and technical support services to help Ancun build a blockchain infrastructure that will cover more than 100 regions in 28 provinces in China. The ultimate goal: to use Factom's blockchain model to safeguard data history and provide timestamps, thereby ensuring greater openness and accountability while reducing costs.

Kirby said the importance of the project is directly related to the growing peer-to-peer lending culture in China. There are more than 1,600 P2P lending companies in China, which account for billions of dollars in the Chinese economy. He pointed out that because these monetary transactions take place outside of China's traditional banking system, a core problem arises: how to verify and authenticate the existence of these transactions.

The future of data integrity

With the rapid expansion of cities and regions around the world, such as China, it is expected that more and more countries, businesses and governments will embrace technological innovation to handle their large databases and expansion plans. Here, blockchain solutions can provide a higher level of transparency and accountability while reducing costs and expenses.

This aligns with Kirby’s view that Factom is finding that more and more of the projects companies are working on are more about data issues than money transfer issues. He continues to champion the exponential nature of blockchain in providing real-world solutions to overcome these challenges.

Kirby said, “In a sense, Bitcoin is currently limited to seven transactions per second. So if you really start thinking about blockchain technology, you should start thinking many, many, many orders of magnitude beyond seven transactions per second. Especially when it comes to cities where billions or trillions of data points may be affected. That’s what Factom is doing, in my opinion, to allow blockchain technology to scale, and the block size is far beyond what is being discussed.”

"The most important question of the 21st century is how to balance personal privacy with openness and transparency. There is a lot of discussion about this issue in private. - Peter Kirby"

Kirby said the recent Chinese venture is a big opportunity for Factom, which is able to demonstrate another way to extend blockchain — by putting a data layer on top of it. The problem we are ultimately trying to solve is the tendency of certain stakeholders to obfuscate sensor data. We charge and then make sure that the data collected is 100% accurate, so no one can lie about the pollution caused by their city or even their private factory.

In doing so, Kirby says blockchain technology can bring a huge amount of transparency to how cities and businesses actually operate. “Because any time you want transparency in data, you have an incentive to do mischief, and at that point, blockchain can keep everyone honest.

Original article: https://btcmanager.com/news/tech/feature-interview-factom-ceo-peter-kirby-on-blockchain-initiatives-in-china/
By Michael Scott
Compiled by: Kyle
Source (translation): Babbitt Information (http://www.8btc.com/factom-ceo-china-blockchain-initiative)