The U.S. Department of Commerce recently posted data about U.S. real gross domestic product (GDP) on multiple blockchains. The move is an effort to win over President Trump’s confidence in the figures after unfavorable economic data published last month by another department led to the firing of the head of that bureau.
The Department of Commerce
The department’s claims about immutability and transparency get at complaints President Trump voiced after the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) — part of the Department of Labor, not the Department of Commerce — last month published lower-than-expected jobs numbers for July and revised down job creation numbers from the two previous months.
U.S. Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick emphasized the strategic importance of the initiative in a press release, framing it as a way of “making America’s economic truth immutable and globally accessible like never before, cementing our role as the blockchain capital of the world.”
“And everybody has to admit that 3.3% GDP growth is impressive,” Lutnick added.
How the data went on-chain
The department put two data points on nine different public blockchains.
First, it took the PDF document that contained the data about second-quarter GDP and calculated a digital fingerprint of the file. This digital fingerprint, also known as a SHA-256 hash, is effectively a unique identifier. Any copy of the file that has been modified even slightly will have a totally different fingerprint.
Second, the department extracted the top-line GDP figure of 3.3% annual growth.
The department took these two data points and published them to nine different public blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, TRON, Stellar, Avalanche, Arbitrum One, Polygon PoS and Optimism.
Blockchain data companies Pyth and Chainlink facilitated the data dissemination, playing the role of so-called oracles. In the world of distributed ledgers, oracles play the role of gathering data from the internet and other sources to bring real-world data and information onto the blockchain to, for example, help resolve smart contracts.
Exchanges Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken assisted in publishing the GDP data to the blockchains.
Distributed ledgers, at their core, combine peer-to-peer networking, distributed data storage, and cryptography to change how digital assets are stored, recorded and transferred.
This technology ensures records of ownership and transaction histories are distributed across network nodes, forming a shared common ledger that participants agree is correct and is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to alter.
The difference between the ledgers Commerce and banks use
While the Commerce Department used public, permission-less blockchains for the GDP data announcement, the financial industry is primarily focused on using permissioned ledgers for its regulated activities.
The difference between these two types of ledgers lies in who can access the data on them. Anyone can access the data on a permission-less ledger, promoting openness and transparency, but only authorized entities can access data on permissioned ledgers.
Because financial institutions are looking to use blockchains and ledgers to process payments, they typically choose blockchains that only permitted entities can access, to prevent important financial information or transaction histories from falling into the hands of unauthorized individuals.