A new report by the European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions (Eurofound) details how Blockchain technology can be effective in delivering and monitoring public benefits.

The report published two days ago by the EU agency; It covers a number of new technology areas such as artificial intelligence, telepresence* and robotics. Regarding blockchain technology, the report says it can help in "providing and managing the public interest"

"Blockchain technology is still in its early stages"

The report includes following statements:

As in the service industry, the use of Blockchain technology is at an early stage of adoption in the health and social sphere. To date, it has been used to reap cash benefits and track retirement contributions.

However, as the report acknowledges, past experiments with this use case, including an experiment in the UK, did not yield much fruit given the relevant costs. This brought privacy concerns from outside observers, as the Financial Times reported in 2016.

The Employment and Retirement Department announced last August that they are still looking at distributed ledger technology as a possible solution for timely payments to those in the public interest.

 *Telepresence: Remote management of machines using virtual reality technology.