Dragonchain Inc., a blockchain technology platform incubated at Walt Disney Co., and the humanitarian anti-malaria organization M2030 announced Wednesday a partnership dedicated to fighting malaria in the Asia-Pacific region.

M2030 is a Singapore-based humanitarian organization that brings together corporate interests and health organizations under a brand aimed at consumer outreach about eliminating malaria. It connects consumers with businesses interested in donating funds to anti-malaria causes. When M2030 branded products are purchased, all of the promised contribution goes directly to programs that fight malaria in Asia.

As a technology partner to M2030, Dragonchain will provide distributed ledger blockchain service capabilities of the Dragonchain Platform to the humanitarian organization starting in Vietnam. This will be used to secure contributions and facilitate the donation process by providing more transparency and trust.

“Dragonchain’s mission is to empower everyone to overcome global challenges with blockchain,” said Shirly Roets, president of Dragonchain Foundation.

Blockchains operate by providing an immutable ledger distributed between many nodes where transactions are only added after enough of the nodes agree to admit the data. Each transaction is encoded into the blockchain using cryptographic methods that depend on the data “blocks” added previously.

As a result, all data in the blockchain is interrelated to historical transactions and this makes attempts at counterfeiting past data easily detectable. Adding that multiple copies of the ledger are held throughout the network means that tampering with any one ledger can be identified as it will not match any of the other copies.

Using Dragonchain’s platform, donations made through M2030 by member organizations would be easily and transparently tracked. This would have twofold benefits for M2030: First, it would provide increased trust by consumers in the organization’s activities. Second, it would make it easier to maintain compliance with regulations and audit past transactions.

“By using Dragonchain’s services and capabilities, we can enhance the trust in M2030,” Patrik Silborn, co-founder of M2030, said about the partnership.

According to the World Health Organization, there were an estimated 219 million cases of malaria worldwide in 2017 and an estimated 435,000 people died from the disease during that period. Among the most vulnerable to the disease are children under the age of five, who accounted for 61 percent of all deaths worldwide.

Approximately $3.1 billion has been dedicated globally to the elimination of the disease by governments and malaria eradication organizations. Two-thirds of domestic funds to these efforts came from nongovernment organizations such as M2030 in 2017.

“The partnership between Dragonchain and M2030 will eliminate barriers commonly faced by humanitarian groups and leverage blockchain’s unique functionality to support M2030’s goal,” Roets said.

Using the Dragonchain Platform, M2030 also hopes to lower overhead costs when dealing with charitable contributions and increase efficiency in getting the funds where they they can do the most good. As part of this partnership, M2030 will be bringing on more big businesses in Vietnam.

Photo: Pixabay