India still behind global blockchain hubs: Belfrics Founder

By Priyanka Pani

August 09, 2020

Malaysian FinTech startup Belfrics Global has relaunched it’s operations in the Indian market two years after Reserve Bank of India imposed a banking ban on crypto entities in July 2018. The Kuala Lumpur-headquartered company with specialization in Blockchain solutions and cryptocurrency exchanges, has offices in Singapore, Hong Kong, Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania and Japan. The company is the first company in the Middle East to be approved by a central bank (central Bank of Bahrain) under the FinTech Sandbox license. It’s founder Praveenkumar Vijayakumar in an interview with IBS Intelligence spoke about the challenges it faced in the Indian market post the banking ban, and how it stayed relevant. He also spoke about its new blockchain solutions developed to convert Covid-19-related clinical and vaccination data of citizens from the physical form into digital assets and its importance.

What has been the focus point for Belfrics in the last 12 months?

Ever since the restriction imposed by RBI on financial institutions to serve the digital currency firms, our India operations have been focussed more on the Belrium Blockchain technology front. Our technology division, BelfricsBT has been actively participating in various collaborative projects with the Indian corporates and educational institutions to develop solutions on our hybrid blockchain. It has been a productive 12 months for us as we were able to complete POCs and MVPs with multiple institutions and are looking forward to extending the solution to full-scale offerings.

What is the principle on which the Belrium blockchain functions?

Belrium Blockchain is a first of the kind KYC-compliant blockchain. It is a combination of a private and public blockchain, that provides the required private distributed ledger solution and yet is able to serve all users on the public blockchain. In addition, our side-chain capability enables decentralized application developers to deploy DAPP solutions seamlessly.

What kind of DAPPS are available on the Belrium blockchain?

We have completed university certificate issuance DAPP and have tested with universities in India and Africa. We are currently extending the certificate DAPP to include student onboarding and identity issuance solution and record a complete campus lifecycle on the blockchain. With the pandemic creating havoc across the globe, we quickly directed our focus to develop a COVID-test issuance and tracking DAPP. To support and enhance the social distancing effort by the authorities, we developed a visitor management DAPP on the Belrium blockchain. Both these applications are India’s first blockchain-based application of similar nature to address the Covid-19 pandemic.

Is Belfrics working with any other government bodies on blockchain?

We are currently working with a number of state and local government bodies on various aspects of blockchain implementations to governance and transparency. Owing to the complexity of the technology and due to lack of demonstrable industry examples, the adoption rate is pretty slow. However, we expect to serve a large number of government bodies in the coming months. On a global level, we signed MOU with the ICT ministry of Tanzania for blockchain consultancy and capacity building on a national level.

How do you see the Indian markets adapting to blockchain technology?

Even though a number of startup companies are working on blockchain solutions, as compared to global blockchain hubs, India still has a long way to go. We still are acting as the backend development hub for blockchain players, globally. I would cite regulatory uncertainty towards the digitals assets as one of the reasons for the underperformance of Indian startups in the blockchain space. As and when the digital asset services get fully regulated, we should expect accelerated growth in the Indian blockchain space. The inflow of international FDI’s also will kick in once regulators SEBI or RBI clears the air for digitals assets transactions.

Could you talk about the platforms launched for tracking Covid19 cases in India via blockchain.

We have launched BelYo, a clinical data issuance platform built on Belrium Blockchain, that can be used for issuance of COVID test and immunization records in a secure and decentralized manner. Hospitals, clinics and test centres are able to issue test results to the person’s digital wallet with a colour coding, which can be retrieved and shared securely. With user consent, the test records can be shared among various governmental agencies for aiding social distancing and tracing efforts. In addition, we are also launching Belshare, a visitor management solution for merchants and users

What are some challenges in the Indian market?

For our technology division, our short term and medium-term focus would be on digitizing the India health management process so as to aid the government and the public to combat the pandemic effectively. We will handhold SMEs to adopt digital solutions to keep them safe and do business as usual. For our financial division, with the supreme court’s ruling in favour of digital exchanges, we will be activating our digital exchange operations by September and will closely coordinate with SEBI and RBI to operate under a regulatory license.

Recently, you became the first blockchain company in Kenya to get a regulatory license to serve capital markets. Is the RBI or SEBI providing similar sandbox licenses in India?

This is a great feat for us. We worked for more than two years with the regulators and the central bank to educate on blockchain solutions and the capabilities. The current license allows us to experiment with the capital markets participants to use our Belrium blockchain solution to innovate on customer onboarding process and payment solutions. RBI also has sandbox processes but the lack of clarity on the status of the digital assets is a blocker for us to effectively explore this option. However, we expect that the regulatory regime for digital assets will be in place very soon, which will help us in serving the Indian market effectively.

August 07, 2020