With an aim to provide a highly transparent and low-risk solution, National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) is conducting tests to use blockchain technology for e-voting for listed companies, said a statement. The pilot, which is being conducted involves setting up a blockchain to connect the regulator with the company and the registrar and transfer agents (RTA) during the voting process. The voting rights will be tokenized, thus making them easy to transfer and proxy. “The test will be evaluated on the auditability of the actions on the chain as well as the ease of conducting the process using blockchain,” said NSE.
“The immutable nature of blockchain will ensure that every action taken by a network participant is transparent to the regulator. Additionally, the smart contract framework enables synchronization of the vote count process between the company and the regulator in real time. These features will take us closer to an environment of improved corporate governance and compliance,” said Sankarson Banerjee, CTO-Projects, NSE.
For this pilot, NSE has collaborated with blockchain firm Elemential. The blockchain will be built using Elemential platform on Hyperledger framework. The SI partner is NSE IT, which is in charge of building and managing the front-end application.
“Blockchain enables a real-time, immutable trail of all activities for the regulator. This brings us a step closer to highly transparent and clear corporate governance; an operating standard that most companies aspire to,” said Raunaq Vaisoha, CEO Elemential Labs.
According to the experts, blockchain offers greater security and transparency especially in a case when the multi-party is involved in a transaction. The use of this technology in India has been growing. States like Telangana have signed several partnerships with blockchain firms to create use cases for adoption. Also, recently, the central government approved a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with BRICS members on collaborative research into blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies (DLT).
