Argentina creates national blockchain committee

The Argentine government today, Dec. 7, 2022, published the creation of the National Blockchain Committee. The new body will aim to organize blockchain implementation at the national and state levels.

The committee will depend on the Secretariat for Public Innovation and the will be chaired by Micaela Sánchez Malcolm, head of the secretariat. In official gazette who reported on the creation of the entity, specifies that “distributed ledger technologies have positioned themselves as a technological alternative to promote transparency of public processes and openness of information to the public, with blockchain technologies being one of the most widely used types of these.”

It is further stated that “this technology can be understood as a disruptive tool for optimizing national public sector processes, policies and services.” Precisely, it would make it possible to “optimize public administration processes and the traceability, transparency and efficiency of services provided to citizens by recording transactions with higher levels of security,” according to the Gazette.

The creation of this body appears to be part of greater regulation by the Argentine state towards Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and related technologies, as required by Financial Action Task Force (FATF) regulations. The FATF will assess Argentina next year, and then the government has taken some steps to comply with its regulations.as the regulation of trade by the National Securities Commission, as reported by CryptoNews.

It is worth noting that. Argentina has an initiative called Blockchain Federal Argentina, in which several companies and organizations are participating. However, as reported by this newspaper in November 2021, that blockchain had a long period of inactivity and, at the time of writing this paper, its block explorer is not available.