Blockchain becomes an imperative technology during COVID-19.

There will be no normal in the new normal world. Returning to travel will not be the same as the pre-COVID era, at least not for some time. The pandemic has not only changed the way enterprises perform a business, but also altered the way life people live. It has propelled the entire world to stay home; the large impact can be seen on global travel. As the humankind is returning to restart economic activities, governments and businesses are taking critical preventative measures. Technology, in such a scenario, plays a substantial role, providing both public and private entities the ability to deliver effective customer experience.

Robots, computer vision, big data analytics and such other technologies are now being used widely at public places such as hospitals, airports, railway stations and more to confine the spread of the disease. Blockchain-related technologies are gaining rapid traction in the travel industry exploring its capabilities. Already, we have heard about the blockchain passport being used by airport authorities to identify COVID-immune passengers.

In an effort to resume the global travel and dodge unequal treatment once a vaccine against COVID-19 arrives, the WHO is teaming up with Estonia. The aim is to create digital vaccination certificates to prove international travelers have had a coronavirus shot and to help distribute vaccines to priority groups first. Tested in a pilot, certificates will be based on the same decentralized and immutable blockchain technology underlying currencies like Bitcoin. Estonian enterprise blockchain firm Guardtime, which has worked on several key e-government projects, will lead the 12-week pilot to test the possibility of a global scale platform in pathfinder countries.

“Most other blockchain solutions are lab-projects, but it’s a challenge to scale them to billions of people, what we’re offering to the WHO is speed,” said Ain Aaviksoo, head of Guardtime’s Tallinn unit in an interview with Bloomberg. “The WHO isn’t doubtful about ‘certificates’ in general but about what’s being certified,” Aaviksoo said. “When a vaccine has been cleared for the market, it should be effective so it makes sense to certify vaccination as a fact and set rules based on it.”

Blockchain is a transformational and impactful technology, embracing a distributed architecture. The basic principles underlying blockchain are decentralized ledger, where every transaction is updated simultaneously across all nodes as a new block. Consensus validation, where any transaction to be added to the blockchain. Immutable and Tamper-proof, where only verified transactions are added to the chain. And user authentication with cryptographic security, where each user with access to a blockchain is issued two cryptographic keys, private and public.