Billon Group has received a £50,000 grant to create an immunity certificate platform using distributed ledger technology (DLT). The funding came via a Fast Start Competition by Innovate UK. The goal is to speed up and support workers’ return to a safe workplace. Billon group has raised over $16 million in growth capital with its most recent funding round taking place last March in a Series A round. Billon is an enterprise iteration of DLT that addresses some of the shortcomings of other blockchains such as speed.
According to a release, by the end of August, Billon expects to provide a fully functioning prototype for publishing, sharing, and verifying a wide array of workplace training or medical test documents as a back-end system for any company or governmental issuer of certificates. The privacy of personal information is expected to be assured.
David Putts, Chief Growth Officer of Billon, commented on the grant:
“Billon wants to do its part to get employees back to work safely and for the economy to stay open. With this project, we want to encourage companies and health organisations to provide proper training and testing and to take advantage of new blockchain and identity management technology to equip people to prove they have an authentic certificate — while hiding private data from those that would exploit it. We need solutions that protect people and their data. This project will deliver such a solution.”
Billon says the prototype will be a plug-and-play solution that augments any existing issuer of a certificate. Companies will be able to connect their existing systems via APIs. Users would be able to control their certificates on their mobile phones and display them when needed. Billon explains that public health organizations could use their system to certify standards for returning to work. Billon adds that this approach is similar to other clients like the Polish credit reporting bureau BIK.
Billon says their solution will use blockchain technology to deliver “immutable, tamper-free solutions designed to comply with GDPR and other privacy regulations.”
Billon states that it is one of 800 projects selected from more than 8,600 applications to the Fast Start Competition launched in April by Innovate UK. Grants provide technology and research-focused businesses resources to develop new ways to work and other innovations born of the coronavirus pandemic.