According to a recent report, Malaysia’s national applied research and development centre under the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) has unveiled plans to expand its use of blockchain technology through an American multinational computer software company’s cloud-based platform.
The Malaysian government has been experimenting with the use of blockchain technology to streamline workflow and ease of doing business in the country.
In particular, MIMOS had initially leveraged open source hyper-ledger and had completed a proof of concept (POC) with respect to traceability of palm oil.
However, wanting to expand its experimentation, the research centre approached the computer company for use of their cloud-based Blockchain Platform, citing its enterprise-grade architecture as a key reason for its selection.
The enterprise-grade architecture was an important factor, ensuring the best security, scalability, and performance characteristics required for production use.
In addition to use cases around traceability, the government has also experimented with blockchain technology in areas such as cashless wallets, power distribution, and transaction origination.
The CTO of MIMOS stated that as the nation’s rapid transformation journey advances further into the Fourth Industrial Revolution, blockchain technologies can help drive greater growth in various sectors, and serve as potent enablers for Industry4WRD (the National Policy on Industry 4.0).
More specifically, the Malaysian Government aims to drive change in the manufacturing sector by making the traceability process more transparent and immutable.
In addition, to its enterprise-grade architecture, its selection hinged on a number of other key factors, including its plug and play integration with existing business systems, which simplifies and shortens the setup processes and makes ongoing deployment easier.
Furthermore, the fact that it is an open platform enables MIMOS to more easily connect into other systems or the computer firm’s applications should the need arises, like company’s ERP Cloud for supply chain purposes or its Autonomous Database, to gain deeper analytics capabilities, to simplify reporting by creating interactive dashboards and reports.
The use of blockchain technology has been gaining traction in Malaysia. The Minister of Malaysian Deputy Agriculture and Agro-based Industries recently stated that the government is looking into utilising blockchain to track and control agricultural and Halal products at a recent international Halal expo held in Penang.
Additionally, the Malaysian Industry-Government Group for High Technology (MIGHT) has been established to explore how the country can use emerging and new technologies like blockchain for progress and development.
It was noted that being one of the key contributors in raising Malaysia’s innovation competitiveness, MIMOS has been the pioneer in grooming technopreneurs through patentable technology platforms, products and solutions.
The computer firm stated that it is honoured to collaborate with MIMOS underpinning the future of blockchain development in Malaysia.
The Malaysian Government’s commitment to developing blockchain technology includes seeking out international talent.
According to a report by OpenGov Asia, Malaysia has launched a work visa program which targets tech freelancers. The aim is to address a demand for blockchain capable talents.
The Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) (a government-owned organization that oversees the tech sector), a blockchain organization and a job marketplace jointly launched the program.
The program seeks to attract foreign professionals who will have the right to stay in the country for up to 12 months to provide blockchain-related services or undergo training at a Malaysian company.
With the country investing in technology in a variety of ways, it is expected that Malaysia will see a spike in blockchain innovations and new distributed ledger (DLT) technologies.
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