Public Private Partnerships building the virtual barcode for

financial inclusion

Summary
Dutch Blockchain Coalition (DBC) is an initiative of the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs. In the view
of the Ministry, blockchain is a transformational technology that requires next level collaborative
efforts between governments, academia, regulators and business partners with multilateral and
multisectoral business processes. The currently 35 DBC partners come from Government Service
providers (Ministry of the Interior, Tax Authority, Chamber of Commerce, Cadaster), Dutch banks and
Insurers, Notaries, Utility companies, Port of Rotterdam , Dutch Authority for Financial Markets,
Science Institutes and DLT services providers.

DBC is a public private partnership, technology agnostic, 50% co-financed by Dutch government but
fully managed by the partners themselves. DBC is designated to deliver all required basic and common
functional components for blockchain applications. Industry sectors in so-called fieldlabs will apply
these basic common components into their business applications.

One of the projects at hand in building the required common components for DLT applications are
uniform and trusted Identifiers for goods and materials: unbreakable virtual barcodes.

Situation
On a daily basis billions of economic transactions are taking place within and across country and
language borders. Each region or country has its own transaction language, with all the communication
problems it entails. Even in spite of existing barcodes, banking, identity and reference numbers trade
communication and trust provisioning still is very complex, slow and costly and expensive. Delivering
trust currently occupies 25% for the US economy work force.

For small entrepreneurs in developing economies and markets the complexities and costs of doing
transactions on large, formal and non-local markets are too high to participate. Trusted Identifiers,
Verifiable Claims, Blockchain (DLT) and smart contracts can provide trust much more cheaply. In
developing economies lower thresholds to markets will advance inclusion and resilience of SMSE’s.

Part of the solution is virtual barcoding through a Uniform Entity and Transaction Protocol (UETP) . A
cellular internet of entities will enable that, by using their smartphones, small producers or sellers can
cheaply, quickly and unbreakably identify the origin and ownership of the products they offer. Part of
this is geo- and timestamping and other biometrically unbreakable attestations on provenance and
ownership. Strong multilingual capability in more than 80 languages provide accurate contextual and
semantically precise translations. The Uniform Entity Transaction Protocol will dramatically improve
supply chain efficiencies and transparencies.
Strategy
In order to come to large scale adoption of any kind of standards on any market, business driven
collaboration between partners is key. In many markets diverging roles and interests lead to ‘market
failures’ prohibiting the development and adoption of essentially required market functionalities. It is
the role of Dutch Blockchain Coalition to help bridging the divides and support the effectuation of
beneficial DLT solutions. DBC convenes and supports coalitions of the willing in minimal viable
ecosystems of policymakers, regulators, science and businesses.