Blockchain appeared 10 years ago and has flourished in the last few years when it was applied in cryptocurrencies, non-fungible token (NFT), and GameFi (a combination of games and decentralized finance).

The world's technology giants such as Microsoft, Meta, Google, Tencent, Amazon, and IBM are investing heavily in this field.

In Vietnam, blockchain is known for becoming the "cradle" of blockchain games and decentralized finance, with projects such as Axie Infinity, Kyber Network, Tomochain, Coin98...

Blockchain is also widely applied in many other fields, bringing high efficiency. For example, Viettel Group, since 2018, has successfully applied blockchain to healthcare. Viettel Business Solutions Corporation has used blockchain technology to manage personal health records, helping people save time and costs and help hospitals reduce costs.

The VNPT Group has applied blockchain on the VNPT eKYC electronic identity platform, helping to verify, identify and extract accurate information from photos and personal documents. This platform processes 500,000 to 1 million transactions each day.

In the field of logistics, the FPT Group has blockchain-based Akachain solution in traceability of Vietnam’s export goods. Akachain enables efficient management of logistics across the entire chain, from order processing, quality management, packaging, warehousing to distribution, so that information about goods is retrieved and tracked at any time.

In the banking sector, Military Bank (MB) and the Bank for Foreign Trade of Vietnam (Vietcombank) have successfully applied blockchain technology in digital banking services.

Most recently, Thu Do Multimedia has integrated blockchain technology in copyright protection and instantly recognizes the remuneration of the parties involved in content composition. With this application, each sharing of digital content is recorded by the system.

There are countless examples of blockchain applications in many fields in Vietnam such as agriculture, transportation, industrial production.

Experts said that in Vietnam, blockchain technology has been applied in financial management, in the real estate market to create a public and transparent market, and in agriculture to trace the origin of products.

Blockchain technology helps to shorten time, optimize the import process, and save costs. Besides, the parties share the same responsibilities and all activities are transparent on the network.

The space for blockchain  

Mr. Nguyen Manh Cuong, Deputy Director in charge of Southern Affairs Department (Ministry of Science and Technology), said the Vietnamese blockchain community has developed strongly in the past five years, but blockchain application is still limited. Currently, blockchain is mainly applied in the financial sector, especially digital assets and digital currencies. This is an area where Vietnam and many other countries are still in a trial process.

"Businesses should not focus too much on one area like finance, and ignore other potential applications such as traceability in agriculture, logistics, and warehousing...", Mr. Cuong said.

“Blockchain in the future is like the Internet that entered Vietnam in 1997, which will penetrate economic, social fields and daily life. No industry has grown as fast as information technology, and in information technology, no field has grown as fast as blockchain,” said Dr. Dang Minh Tuan, Head of Blockchain Lab, Institute of Post and Telecommunications Technology.

Deputy Minister of Information and Communications Nguyen Huy Dung said that Vietnam currently does not have a specific legal corridor for blockchain. This is one of the main reasons why Vietnamese blockchain start-ups often locate their headquarters abroad to easily operate and raise capital. This leads to a missed opportunity to attract large financial resources in the blockchain sector.

“Therefore, one of the key tasks in 2022 of the Ministry of Information and Communications is to develop a blockchain master plan and advise the Government, and coordinate with a number of ministries and sectors to take early actions, in order to gradually improve the legal framework for blockchain and related applications,” Mr. Dung said.

Dau Tu