Estonia is a frontrunner in digital public services, and its thriving technology sector is now coding the future of Web3.
“Estonia has achieved a lot on our digital journey, and I am pleased to see that we are again ranking first in developing digital public services and among the top European top 10 countries overall. We are rightfully known as the most advanced digital society in the world,” the Estonian minister of Entrepreneurship and Information Technology, Andres Sutt, noted.
Web3 is the next frontier in technology services, especially since Facebook rebranded itself as Meta and is committed to developing a metaverse-focused future.
Although readers should note that the metaverse is but one concept of Web3, a community housing the metaverse, virtual reality, avatars, augmented reality, blockchain technology, and digital assets like cryptocurrency and non-fungible tokens (NFTs).
Estonia will be the first country to fully embrace Web3
Estonia has already embraced the Web2 to Web3 evolution. The country has developed X-Road, its proprietary decentralised, distributed system, in 2001 and has utilised Blockchain since 2008, intending to place Estonia at the forefront of the emerging Blockchain economy.
Furthermore, Estonia’s IT jurisdiction has been regulated since 2018 fostering conditions to make it easy for cryptocurrency startups in the blockchain technology industry to obtain licences.
However, Web3 is more than just cryptocurrencies. Web 3.0 aims to create a decentralised world wide web where every individual will be in control of their data.
Using blockchain technology to manage individual data will create a public decentralised digital registry of who owns what on the network: land, medical records, and even supply chain information. Each registry entry will link to the previous entry, so they are all connected as a chain and cannot be faked or counterfeited.
Estonian companies, including Guardtime, Single.Earth, and Supplain, are using Web3 to build their next products: from medical records to protecting global forests to improving supply chains.
Supplain’s CEO, Sander Gansen, notes, “It’s interesting; it’s predominantly a private sector and big tech-driven initiative and trend. The Estonian government have not done much yet; however, they are beginning to become more enthusiastic when they participated in the first NFT Tallinn conference in April 2022.”
Gansen opines, “It seems ad hoc from an outsiders’ perspective, but we’re seeing the Estonian government taking Web3 more seriously because it’s a movement where people come together. Anything that makes people come together, it gets governments interested.”
This increased interest has led Gansen and the Supplain team to New York to host a side event for NFT.NYC held together with the Consulate General of Estonia and Enterprise Estonia at the Estonian House in New York.
“This event gives us a prime opportunity to invite significant players from the USA’s Web3 investors to meet the Estonian Web3 builders and form partnerships for our future ecosystem”, states Gansen.
How Estonia will code the future of supply chains with Web3
Supplain intends to fix broken supply chains caused by pandemics and conflict by utilising blockchain technology to introduce real-time interoperability between companies, implement traceability and proof-of-delivery mechanisms and simplify setting up trustless business procedures.
Much like Single.Earth, Supplain will follow a similar pattern of other Web3 lead companies and offer stakeholders tokens in reward for them developing a blockchain protocol to benefit the supply chain community.
So far, the company behind Supplain, WOF Labs, has developed their own NFT token collection for early community members to join, called World of Freight. It’s enabled the company to raise €1 million in funds to develop their supply chain game simulator and lay the foundations for building the supply chain messaging protocol, Supplain.
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