Legislators of the state of Illinois, have officially advanced a bill to establish a government task force to regulate the Blockchain industry and sector.
House Resolution 120, which was approved with 98 votes, requests the government to create an inter-governmental Blockchain task force to provide a more efficient and regulatory-friendly ecosystem for Blockchain development firms, research organizations and businesses.
The bill entitled “Blockchain Task Force” read:
“Creates the Illinois Legislative Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Task Force to study how and if the State of Illinois, county governments, and municipal governments can benefit from a transition to a Blockchain-based system for recordkeeping and service delivery.”
What the Blockchain bill would do to Illinois Blockchain sector
Since January of this year, the government of Illinois has been attempting to evaluate and understand Blockchain technology or distributed ledger technology to provide a better ecosystem for businesses working with the technology to automate certain processes, supply chains and operations.
In March, the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulations also joined the R3 Consortium, better known as R3CEV, in order to better comprehend Blockchain technology and its intricacies. However, it remains unclear whether the government agency will remain within R3CEV since the company has shifted from the development of Blockchain technology to distributed ledger technology-inspired platforms such as R3 Corda.
In an official blog post, R3 CEO David Rutter wrote:
“While we were almost certainly guilty of slipping into this semantics trap now and again, we’ve said from the beginning that Corda is a distributed ledger platform, not a traditional Blockchain platform. It was never designed to be one.”
If the Illinois Department of Financial and Professional Regulations remains within the R3 Consortium, it will be likely to evaluate how other consortia are working with Blockchain-inspired technologies to optimize the global banking system.
Leading to federal government involvement?
The bill also requires the Illinois Blockchain task force to present a report on the Blockchain and distributed ledger industries by January of 2018, to the General Assembly. Findings and recommendations will be made to the General Assembly and based on that report. The US federal government will likely decide whether to regulate the Blockchain sector further or leave it to grow at an exponential rate and allow Blockchain businesses to innovate the technology further.
Previously, Cointelegraph reported that some of the largest banks in the world including Goldman Sachs have begun to perceive the true potential of Blockchain technology in the traditional finance sector.
In a report entitled “Goldman Sachs Finally Recognizes the Power of Blockchain Technology,” Cointelegraph revealed that Goldman Sachs believes Blockchain offers a transparent, efficient and secure infrastructure for data processing and transaction settlement.
As the US government takes an interest in the Blockchain sector and companies continue to develop Blockchain-based applications, the industry will likely experience explosive growth in terms of commercial implementation and roll out.