Blockchain in the public sector

Blockchain has been receiving a lot of attention for its potential to enable non-third-party involvement between financial transactions, its resistance to hacking, and its transparency characteristic. One of the most obvious and powerful use cases of blockchain is in the cryptocurrency ecosystem, namely Bitcoin and other alternative coins. Following the success of Bitcoin, many blockchain advocates are trying to explore the possible benefit of this technology in other areas as well. While there are many ongoing research directions, in this thesis, we want to explore the topic of blockchain in the public sector thoroughly. The primary goal of this thesis is to look closely at the current position of blockchain in the public sector, the hypothetical use cases, challenges and limitations, and the adoption procedures. We also propose the proof-of-concept of blockchain usage for open dataset integrity. To achieve this, we model the application to collaborate the open data API with the Ethereum blockchain. Three significant findings were discovered from the study. First, it is the preference of permissioned blockchain implemented for public sector applications. Second, we found that, despite the external novel blockchain use cases, there are uncertainties over the technology maturity, regulation, standardization, security, and this technology as a whole when implementing them. Finally, it is the pathway of blockchain adoption in the public sector compared to the private sector. Regarding our proposed proof-of-concept, we found that it is very effective and efficient for record consistency and large record comparison. One limitation is the capability to figure out the modification bits of data in case changes were captured.