National Stock Exchange Of India Pilots Blockchain e-Voting For Firms

The National Stock Exchange of India (NSE) is piloting a blockchain platform created by Elemential Labs to carry out e-voting for publicly listed companies, according to domestic media outlet Hindu Business Line.

The NSE’s testing will bring about tokenizing voting rights and utilizing the blockchain platform to link the organization, registrar and transfer agents (RTA), and the regulatory authority.

Hindu Business Line has quoted that tokenized votes are both easy to proxy and transfer, and the piloting will apparently be utilized to assess how comfortable it is to audit the whole of the voting process using blockchain.

Commenting on the initiative, Sankarson Banerjee, CTO of projects at NSE, said that the blockchain setup provides features that can draw the exchange “closer to an environment of improved corporate governance and compliance,” laying out that:

“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 synchronisation of the vote count process between the company and the regulator in real time.”

Elemential Labs’ platform employs the Hyperledger framework, and NSE will supposedly take the responsibility of building and administering the front-end software of the system. Elemential CEO Raunaq Vaisoha reverberated Banerjee in supporting blockchain’s capability to guarantee regulatory fulfillment in real time and to present “highly transparent and clear corporate governance,” which he looked upon as “an working standard that most companies aspire to.”

As detailed earlier this month, the Union Cabinet of India, which is the country’s prime decision-making organization headed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, has endorsed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with BRICS members on joint research into distributed ledger technologies (DLT).

Earlier this summer, the Indian state of Telangana declared that it would be inking multiplel MoUs with blockchain companies to implement the technology across various government services.

While blockchain is making headway in Indian government organizations, India’s Supreme Court is reviewing the Reserve Bank of India (RBI)’s debatable ban on banks’ dealings with crypto-related firms. Earlier this week, the court took into consideration the final round of appeals on the ban, which has been effective since July 6.