AccelOne’s Blockchain Solution: Creation of Digital Tokens & Wallets for Government

The Requirement

The Government of the Province of San Luis, Argentina sought to modernize its graduation award program, replacing paper certificates with digital tokens to combat inflation and promote financial literacy and inclusion among students.

San Luis Governor at the moment Dr. Alberto Rodríguez Saá has proclaimed digital inclusion to be, “the first human right that is not born from the economy, but from science and technology.”

In 2010, the province began offering financial incentives for students to earn their high school diplomas, boosting graduation rates by 20% and positioning San Luis above the national average graduation rates. Despite the program’s success, its original graduation award framework, which had been distributing the awards to students via paper certificates that students would physically redeem at a bank for Argentinian pesos, not only made the process of the award’s redemption inconvenient but also made it susceptible to the country’s legendarily high inflation which made its value plummet whether students redeemed the certificate immediately or waited to cash it in.

Business Solution:

By 2020, San Luis leaders saw an opportunity to amplify its modernization efforts through blockchain technology. To test the efficacy of this initiative, they decided to launch a pilot program involving the graduation award system.

Officials went looking for answers and asked AccelOne to devise a robust and secure technology solution that would entice digital-native users, make their financial data more accessible and secure, and encourage savings and smart money habits by preventing rampant devaluation.

AccelOne created a private blockchain platform, Billetera Activa, allowing students to store and redeem digital tokens backed by the U.S. dollar, ensuring the value of their awards was preserved despite Argentina’s high inflation.

“When we started this project, we knew there were opportunities to serve our community with blockchain technology, with a very specific goal in a very short amount of time. The AccelOne team was able to envision the opportunity to make a real impact. We are very grateful for AccelOne’s responsiveness and willingness to work as a team from the beginning; taking our idea and turning it into an application with a real impact on the community, giving their engineers the autonomy to be creative and diligent.” Jeremias J. Thuer. San Luis product owner

Approach & Technical Solution:

With an all hands-on-deck mentality, AccelOne's team worked within an agile environment and team configuration to conduct parallel analysis, design, development, and quality assurance. They were able to launch operational versions of the platform after five months – in time for December’s student graduations.

For additional security, AccelOne recommended that clients hire an independent third party to test for any gaps in cybersecurity controls, ensuring the highest level of security for the app’s infrastructure.

The technology used to create and deploy the solution (Billetera Activa) includes Hyperledger Fabric for the blockchain, Flutter for the mobile wallet app, Node.js for the API and integrations, ReactJS for the back-office web application, AWS for the cloud services, CI / CD within those services, and Docker Containers.

AccelOne implemented multi-factor authentication and biometric validation for secure transactions.

Results:

The platform successfully launched, with 100% of eligible students creating accounts and redeeming 84% of their tokens. Almost 25% of students chose to save their tokens, promoting financial literacy and inclusion as intended.

Thanks to this innovative, agile and responsive partnership, Billetera Activa achieved client objectives for accessibility, stability, security, fraud detection, and regulatory compliance while maintaining flexibility and the ability to scale the system beyond student users. The platform enables government officials to create and manage ASL tokens, allowing for fully auditable transactions with the ability to restrict access. It leverages multi-factor authentication (MFA), biometric validation for transactions, and digital IDs using Know Your Customer (KYC) best practices.