If you read these blogs you will know that since June 2020 BlockMark Tech have been working on developing Immunity Passports for the Department of Health.
We had already spent 2 years successfully developing The Registry for the issuing, managing and verifying enterprise certificates.
As a response to the coronavirus pandemic – Innovate UK want us to develop a mobile version for issuing and managing COVID 19 vaccines certificates.
In May 2020, over 8000 companies applied to support Innovate UK in their COVID response. BlockMark Tech was part of the 9% chosen to Research and Develop solutions to solve a national and emerging global pandemic.
After receiving top marks for our early work in June to August, the competition continues ; from 8000 companies to 800 companies – In November BlockMark was one of just 7 final companies selected to present to the Department of Health COVID 19 Test & Trace team.
BlockMark continues to develop its revolutionary Mobile Digital Immunity Passport with a new Extension Award by Innovate UK on December 1st 2020.
So what exactly are we doing? Well for a start it’s not revolutionary. It’s incremental, carefully thought out tech that is responsive to TLR (Technology Readiness Levels.) Not the TLR of BlockMark Tech. But TLR of the NHS and the UK public.
Revolutionary tech would include inserting microchips like Bill Gates into vaccines that would act as certificates. But SPOILER ALERT … fake news aside that’s just not possible.
Instead, using the innovative tradition of recombining existing elements and playing with the Adjacent Possible – BlockMark Tech have developed a workable, simple and effective digital Immunity Passport. It’s oven ready.
Think of printing before Gutenberg. There was the wine press AND there was moveable type. They both already existed and Gutenberg was familiar with them both.
By recombining, with great vision, Gutenberg innovated and created the printing press. In 1440 Gutenberg didn’t try to create Desk Top Publishing or Blogger. With all the Innovation Theatre talk of ‘disruptive tech’ – its easy to lose sight of the reality that most tech develops incrementally.
Inspired by Gutenberg, what BlockMark Tech have done is recombine mobile phones, QR codes, Distributed Ledger Technology and secure cryptography (for enhanced privacy) to create a simple digital Immunity Passport. That’s what Innovate UK and the Department of Health wanted. And that’s what we have given them.
Have a look at our demo video to see how it all works here. Remember the alternative is a highly complicated and politically charged and largely unusable Medical Record system, or an easily faked paper based system or of course no system at all.
At BlockMark Tech we have based our system on the Immunity Passport that has existed in paper format since the 1960’s – The Yellow Card or ICVP or International Certificate for Vaccination and Prophylaxis. To find out more about this paper certificate read our blog post on the ICVP here.
For added security and to prevent fraud – did we mention it’s blockchain backed too? Before you start thinking Bitcoin and cryptocurrency – you should know how we are using blockchain and why.
Before blockchain there were central databases. A double entry book keeping system is a central record of credits, debits and balances. But what if you can’t trust your book keeper or accountant?
Blockchains are databases or ledgers – but the key difference is that they are distributed (DLT = Distributed Ledger Technology). Unlike hacking and changing one central registry, it’s very very difficult to hack 20,000 cryptographically secure distributed ledgers at the same time.
Instead of entering digital currency transactions on a crypto blockchain- at BlockMark Tech we are simply entering a certificate reference on the blockchain ledger.
It looks a little like this.
We take the certificate data (who/what/where/when) and using secure cryptography we turn it into a pseudonymous ‘fingerprint’.
Although there are 20,000 copies of the fingerprint across the world – it is impossible to reverse engineer the ‘fingerprint’ to work out the certificate information
You can learn more about our optional blockchain logging service here.
Do contact us if you want a demo or have any questions or comments on Immunity Passports.
