Blockchain Sandbox is Poland's first business and technology platform designed to accelerate the development of innovative blockchain solutions within an isolated system that simulates real world production environment. To take us through this innovative solution we are joined by Dorota Dublanka, President of the Foundation Cyberium and Head of Human Resources at KIR along with Maciek Jędrzejczyk, Blockchain Technical Leader at IBM for Central and Eastern European Region and lead architect of the blockchain sandbox.

 What is blockchain?Dororta defines blockchain as a list of records that is stored on a wide range of computers. She also refers to blockchain as lego blocks where different participants join together to build a tower together whilst verifying each blocks added to the structure and exchanging information between each other.

Maciek’s defines blockchain as a database with a very specific data structure whereby transactions are put together into a block representing an interval of time between the recording of a previous state and the current state which is going through the approval process. Each block is cryptographically linked to previous blocks and the governance over how the data is stored on the chain is determined by the network. The network decides whether or not certain transactions are going to be included within a block or not.

 State of innovation within the financial sector in PolandMaciek states that to understand the state of innovation in the financial sector in Poland one has to go back 30 years to 1989 – 1990 when Poland transitioned to a market economy. At that time there was no digitisation and computers were virtually inexistent. The financial infrastructure was nearly all paper based. Everything had to be created from scratch which represented both a set of challenges and opportunities for Poland.

Poland had virtually no technical debt, or legacy IT infrastructure  within its financial services sector that other countries in Western Europe or in North America had. This enabled the Poles to choose the best and most flexible solution to their specific needs. As the Polish leadership and society were very curious they were also very open to innovation.

Dorota added that, Poland has a relatively high social acceptance for innovative solutions. Poland has one of the highest percentages of mobile banking and debit cards users in Europe. Because of its embracing approach to innovation, Poland has adopted a lot of the most innovative platforms for payment solutions and its IT professionals rank as some of the top 10 best in the world.

 The Blockchain SandboxBlockchain Sandbox is here to accelerate the development of innovative blockchain solutions in Poland. They aim to demystify what is blockchain and break the view that it’s only related to cryptocurrencies. They wish to develop blockchain technology to support entrepreneurs and companies to access solutions within the sandbox.

Startups and major companies who join the sandbox with innovative ideas can leverage blockchain within the sandbox for developing their applications and business solutions. They will also receive support from the blockchain sandbox founding members.

Foundation Cyberium is the leader of the Blockchain Sandbox. The founding members are PKO Bank Polski, KIR and IBM. PKO Bank Polski is one of the biggest banks in Central and Eastern Europe who has implemented production grade blockchain solutions.

KIR is the hub of shared services for the Polish financial services sector. They build system solutions for the banking business and the government. KIR is one of the sandbox leaders and is implementing innovative solutions to the economy.

IBM is the technology partner to the Sandbox initiative. Chmury Krajowej, the national cloud operator, responsible for sustaining the IT infrastructure for mission critical applications in in Poland, is a technology provider to the initiative.