The Treasury Department is turning to blockchain in a six-month project that ultimately intends to streamline agencies’ financial processes—and re-imagine how the government does business.
The new Blockchain for Grant Payments project—steered by the Bureau of the Fiscal Service’s Office of Financial Innovation and Transformation, or FIT, and unveiled Monday—will explore the operational and legal implications of leveraging blockchain to track grant payment-related activities.
Often associated with cryptocurrencies it underpins, blockchain is a technological tool that provides a means to virtually record and validate the provenance of transactions and digital assets without a centralized authority.
“Through this effort we hope that we will be able to add additional clarity for, not only this use case, but for the broader federal community on whether or not blockchain technology is a tool that we can leverage to achieve mission goals,” Fiscal Service Public Affairs Specialist Bradley Benson told Nextgov via email Wednesday. “We hope our work helps to advance this issue forward and that others will be able to learn and build upon our work.”
The new proof of concept follows a prior six-month effort that the FIT carried out in 2017, which looked into the use of blockchain technology to manage and track government equipment—and specifically, government-issued mobile phones. Benson said the work helped the agency’s officials gain “a better understanding of some of the basic functionality of blockchain,” and offered them hands-on experience with things like peer-to-peer asset transfers via “tokenization” (or digitally representing an asset on a blockchain), system resiliency, and close to real-time transparency when assets are transferred between parties. After that project, the office’s personnel followed up with another proof of concept, through which th ..
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