New Delhi:

Blockchain technology can help create a just and trust-based society, Mukesh Ambani, India’s richest man, said, backing a technology that has grabbed the attention of businesses and policymakers of late.

Blockchain is a shared database where records cannot be altered or reversed, aiding transparency and security in transactions. It has found its biggest application in cryptocurrency in the last decade.

“Blockchain is a technology I believe in, and it’s different from crypto. I think that smart token and making sure that you are creating transactions that can never be changed is a very important framework for a just, and trustbased transactions, and trust-based society, which is a prerequisite for all of us,” the chairman of Reliance Industries (RIL) told a conference on financial technology. India has been engaged in a fierce debate over cryptocurrency lately with the government planning to introduce a Bill on this in parliament in the ongoing Winter session. Blockchain technology can have wider applications across many segments of the economy, most notably in financial services.

“Finance really is at the heart of everything, and we have not digitised finance to its full potential. I believe we are at very early stages of sporadic digitisation,” Ambani said, pushing for wider adoption of a ‘decentralised model of finance’. “Today, it’s still a world where large companies get finance and small companies don’t get easier finance.”

The deeper adoption of digital technologies can make it easier for smaller businesses and lay people to access finance, Ambani said. “I think the convergence of real-time, the convergence of distributed ledger and blockchain technology, smart token, the convergence of physical and digital through IoT (internet of things) will enable and will redefine the decentralised financial sector in a way that we have never imagined,” he said.

RIL, which has a big presence in oil and gas, retail, and telecom, has gone big on digital technologies in the last few years. It has roped in investors including tech giants Google and Facebook. The world will be transformed by the “digitalfirst revolution”, Ambani said.

“The physical world will become subordinate to the digital world. It is today possible to design (a product) end-to-end first in the digital space, test it as per all possible parameters and then translate it into reality,” he said.

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