Blockchain technology directly affects both the functioning and growth of competitiveness of the Polish banking sector and the entire national economy. Poland is one of the leaders in the development of initiatives aimed at accelerating innovative blockchain solutions.
Blockchain, or the chain of blocks, is, according to the most commonly used definition, a shared, unalterable record that simplifies the process of recording transactions and tracking shared resources across a business network. The name blockchain comes from the way the data is organized. It is an elongated list of interconnected blocks in which a certain number of changes are grouped in the form of so-called transactions. Each new block is appended to the end of the string and contains, among other things, a timestamp that indicates when it was created, as well as a reference to the previous block. The entire system is secured using cryptography. Changing the data of a transaction previously contained in any block would require modification of all subsequent blocks, making changes to historical records virtually unfeasible due to the difficulty involved in recalculating the contents of the blocks.
Taking into account the leading technological solutions in this area and the computing power that ensures their security (invariability of the history of stored blocks), we can safely say that they are solutions that can be considered undefeatable.
In recent years, technological capabilities have grown dynamically, which allowed PKO Bank Polski, together with the National Accounting House (KIR) and technology partners to implement another solution in October last year – durable medium 2.0 for private documents. The new solution makes it possible to provide bank customers with documents concerning them (e.g., lists of payment transactions for credit cards and documentation related to cash loans) in a digital form. With the new durable media feature, the bank was able to increase the number of documents delivered electronically, which will reduce the carbon footprint generated by the company’s operations.
The latest version of the durable media is a versatile tool, offering comprehensive electronic distribution of documents of all types.
In the third quarter of 2021, 19 companies selected in the first call will start testing their solutions within the Sandbox Blockchain platform. Local startups and companies from Israel, Russia, Finland, Great Britain, Romania, Spain and Ireland will test their ideas in Poland. The project will prototype solutions for financial services, data security, energy market settlements or real estate tokenization.