The World Health Organization (WHO) is working with blockchain and other tech companies on a program to help convey data about the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which it is calling MiPasa.
The program is a distributed ledger technology (DLT) that will hopefully help with early detection of the virus and identifying carriers and hotspots.
MiPasa is built on top of Hyperledger Fabric in partnership with IBM, computer firm Oracle, enterprise blockchain platform HACERA and IT corporation Microsoft. It purports to be “fully private” and share information between need-to-know organizations like state authorities and health officials.
Described by creators as “an information highway,” MiPasa cross-references siloed location data with health information. It promises to protect patient privacy and to help monitor local and global trends such as the virus that has now sent the world spiraling into chaos and uncertainty in recent weeks.
The U.S., European, and Chinese Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Hong Kong Department of Health, the Government of Canada and China’s National Health Commission have all worked with the project.
But regardless of the current world disorder, people haven’t ceased paying for things in bitcoin, if the recent $200 million in transactions logged on retailer payment portal Coinbase Commerce are any indication.
The number, announced Thursday, March 26, is a milestone for the company. It encompasses 8,000 integrated retailers that have adopted crypto payments as valid. In the middle of the current coronavirus-caused chaos, this has been a bright spot for the form.
Commerce product lead John Zettler said bitcoin was still far and away the leader of the pack in terms of the types of crypto used for payment, due mostly to familiarity.
HSBC has plans to jettison its paper-based private placement records project throughout this year and next year, and has put $10 billion into it as of Sunday, March 29.
Ciaran Roddy, head of custody innovation and strategy initiatives at HSBC, said the next 12 to 18 months should be able to garner interest, and that he was “confident” they could exponentially increase the project’s size.
HSBC has been using the blockchain space despite a lack of ambition to move into crypto space. This, the company said, is because it wants to tokenize the private placements after digitizing them. Currently, HSBC has no plans to encroach on the crypto space.
The project is slower than anticipated — HSBC said it wanted to have $20 billion by now, but that couldn’t be achieved due to ongoing efforts tinkering with the functionality of the technology.
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