The process uses a smart contract on the Ethereum network. The reception of public bids will culminate on August 6th.
The Government of the Autonomous Community of Aragon, in Spain, opened a public bid on the Ethereum blockchain to acquire 35,000 reusable masks. Public administration personnel will use the material to protect themselves from the COVID-19 pandemic.
The call took place on July 22nd and will end on August 6th. Subsequently, there will be information on the process of selection and announcement of the favored company, which must begin the execution of the contract on August 20th. The base budget for the bid is around EUR 120, according to documents released by the authorities.
Companies will place their bids electronically using a smart contract on the Ethereum blockchain. The government of Aragon has also conducted bids using Hyperledger Fabric for data management.
It is possible to see the logo of both platforms in all bids on the call website. The blockchain project consultant, Pablo López, stated on his LinkedIn account that the teams from Grupo Oesía and Open Canarias prepared the proposal.
López said that the time has come when the use of smart contracts in blockchain has become something real, simple, and transparent. He believes that this should be the way to manage any public fund. Besides, he congratulates the Government of Aragon, for deciding to bet where others see problems, and the Grupo Oesía and Open Canarias team, for their development.
The companies that López refers to won the award for the development of this type of distributed ledger platform in January 2018. In other words, the advances in the system with blockchain are already at least two and a half years old.
The Government of Aragon has consolidated its system, of which it already has 27 bids in total. The first began to run in August 2019 and the National Public Sector Contracting Platform has validated them throughout Spain.
Bid, Transparency, and Blockchain
The Government of Aragon is one of the Spanish public departments that have used the so-called distributed ledger technology (DLT) to manage public bids. In 2019, the government would adopt Hyperledger Fabric but considered a subsequent recording of the most important data on bids on a public blockchain like Ethereum.
The government would intend to offer higher levels of transparency by using the Ethereum network since Fabric is a permissioned network in which participants must join through a membership service.
The bet on DLT brought good results to the Government of Aragon. In March of this year, the government received an award for promoting transparency with a distributed ledger, an original technology of Bitcoin as a digital system. The reception of the award took place during the National Congress of Innovation and Public Services.
Spain is one of the countries that has suffered the most from the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. Currently, there are more than 272 thousand infected people, and more than 28 thousand dead. The health authorities have reported that the use of masks is one of the main methods to avoid new infections, as well as following the lockdown, and practicing social distance on the street.
By Alexander Salazar
