Austin city is planning to start a project to solve identity crisis for homeless people backed by Blockchain technology. This activity is selected as part of Mayor’s Challenge problem and Austin being one among the chosen 35 cities. The entire project is funded by Bloomberg Philanthropies Organization and the winning city will be rewarded with $5 million.
The identity crisis is posing as the biggest obstacle preventing homeless people from receiving assistance in basic services such as housing, medical care, and labor assistance
As per records, there are around 2000 homeless people with lack of basic amenities and thousand more in borderline to hit poverty. Identity crisis becomes a major hurdle for government to tackle this issue.
As per statements from Mayor Steve Adler,
“At a high level, the pilot is trying to figure out how to solve one of the challenges we have in our community related to the homeless population, which is how to keep all the information of that individual with that individual.”
Despite huge economic growth witnessed by Austin, the high prices of homes throughout the year became a huge problem for homeless people to afford them and as stated by the Mayor,
For everything that is going right, we have some challenges that are shared by a lot of large cities
The main purpose of using the blockchain is to create a unique online identity for homeless people and reestablish their identity by tracking historical records. In this process, the register of every homeless individual will be identified thereby providing them access to data by service workers.
The very challenge in this course would be about maintaining confidentiality which Blockchain can solve it, says Adler.
Furthermore, the old paper records will be replaced by a digitally encrypted form of information which will be more accurate and secure. The Blockchain platform could help service providers verify the identity of a homeless person without having to go through existing paper records or bring someone back to the office for processing.