Ever since the British voted for Brexit back in June 2016, the United Kingdom has pushed itself in great uncertainty, with businesses, jobs, and families, all at stake. Neutralizing the expected damage has turned out to be near to impossible for the lawmakers, politicians, the government, and in particular, Prime Minister Theresa May.
Several businesses Honda and Toyota, and sectors like automobile, IT, pharma, etc., have already started to shift operations to other member countries of the European Union. The uncertainty of deal or no-deal over Brexit has been plaguing almost every sector and business space in the country.
Unfortunately enough, the government has repeatedly tried to strike a deal but has failed miserably over the past several months.
While businesses continue to face severe challenges, speculations have grown stronger touting blockchain technology as the possible solution for problems which have been a matter of concern for the entire kingdom. In fact, one Brexit is complete, it will have a lasting effect on the political and socioeconomic history of the entire bloc. The growing speculation has brought the concept of blockchain in general conscience.
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Many articles have surfaced on the internet over the past few months, claiming blockchain to be the ultimate solution for Britain’s trouble-free exit the European Union. Most recently, founder of Belt and Road Blockchain and international financial infrastructure consultant, Pindar Wong, stated that there could be a blockchain based alternative solution for Brexit. While addressing reporters, he said,
“Britain’s exit from the European Union is not so much a technical crisis between a ‘hard fork’ and a ‘soft fork’ but a legitimacy crisis. Yet the solution to its core dilemma — politically deciding between a ‘Hard Brexit’ and a ‘Soft Brexit’ — may actually lay in harnessing blockchain technology’s great potential as an economic governance system for the digital age.”
Blockchain has been one of the most revolutionary technologies of recent times and has been transforming sectors completely. Within just ten years since inception, the distributed ledger technology has taken over several industries like healthcare, IT, global payments, banking, and finance. However, whether the tech has the potential to solve a problem as complex as Brexit is still not clear. The tech is, currently, too nascent to be experimented on what is said to be the biggest political divorce since the great wars.
Further, Wong argues that Blockchain can also be a possible solution for the Irish Border dispute, which is likely to arise post-Brexit. He said,
“Where blockchain can help is that its ‘cryptographic certainty’ avoids the need for bordered thinking in the borderless world created by the Internet [sic], a world where laws are difficult to enforce and collaboration difficult to incentivize. Could thinking harder about what we mean by a ‘border’ be the key to unlocking the current political deadlock?”
Though the points Wong raised are very good theoretically and conceptually, however applying the same to real borders is next to impossible. What Wong means is that physical border is replaced with digital borders, which in itself seems to fictional. Maybe what he says might be a thing of the future, but currently, blockchain doesn’t seem to be capable of accomplishing such humongous feats.
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Brexit is an extremely serious issue, with the livelihood of hundreds of thousands of people is at stake and a country on the verge of great socioeconomic depression.
