In May 2019, the Electrical and Electronic Association of the Czech Republic (ELA) and its subsidiary ELA Blockchain services a.s., introduced the first Czech industrial blockchain. Based on the Hyperledger Fabric project and developed jointly by experts from IBM Czech Republic and CTU FEE, the ELA Blockchain project is designed to provide an independent, trusted, reliable and durable blockchain platform for business application deployment, no matter how it is used. The platform is currently public and its first use in applications is open to the public. ROWAN LEGAL is a proud partner of this project, in which it participates not only as legal advisor but also as an active member of the network!
ELA Blockchain is a private permissioned blockchain that does not use any tokens. Therefore, nodes can only be operated by reliable and established partners with the ELA’s permission. At the moment, the network consists of 17 nodes, including two in Slovakia. Currently, negotiations are also under way on the involvement of other partners from abroad, as expressed by ELA Director Jan Prokš in an interview for technickytydenik.cz: “Currently, it is not only members of the association that are involved in the project, but also the Electrotechnical Testing Institute, the Czech Accreditation Institute and, of course, IBM. In the near future we plan to grow the network abroad (Hong Kong, Singapore, Morocco and others).” The consensus mechanism for new nodes is based on the functioning of Hyperledger Fabric – requests are circulated among connected nodes, which verify their validity. Monetization is to be achieved through decentralized applications (dApp), in connection with the business activities of companies involved in both development and use.
The first application on ELA Blockchain is a document authentication service, called Blockchain Notarius. The fingerprint (hash) of each digital document which is uploaded by the subjects involved, is recorded in the blockchain. The conformity of a document can then be verified against the submitted copies of the file. At the same time, individual metadata for the document, both public and private, is recorded in the blockchain. In the case of private metadata, after authentication, the user receives information whether the file has been registered – and therefore, recorded in the blockchain. Registration can be done only with the consent of the node owner, who will provide access rights to the non-public part of the application for this purpose. The conditions for granting access depend on the node owner’s business settings.
Involvement of ROWAN LEGAL in the project
ROWAN LEGAL has long supported innovative approaches to available technologies on the market. We are very confident about the functioning of the platform and are positive about the ELA’s approach to the further development of the platform. For these reasons, we were not only pleased to be involved in the development of the platform, but you will now also see us listed as one of node operators, managing a blockchain and involved in its operation. In addition, we act as a legal advisor to the platform and would be happy to help you with the commercial and legal setup of your dApp. At the same time, you will soon be able to purchase and/or verify some of our standardized legal documents for your company’s business.
