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Fighting cancer in Singapore, eating plastic in Indonesia: is Southeast Asia the next Silicon Valley?

Filing taxes using blockchain in Indonesia. Growing better crops in Vietnam with artificial intelligence. Sending rockets into space in Singapore. Southeast Asia is quietly emerging as a breeding ground for new technology

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Regi Wahyu, the CEO of HARA, with farmers in Indonesia. HARA is a data exchange platform that is geared towards small farmers. Photo: HARA

Charles Guinot’s journey to building a multimillion-dollar business started ordinarily enough.

He was at a conference in China in 2015 when he first had an idea on how to use blockchain technology to solve his “painful” problem of filing taxes in Indonesia.

To turn this idea into reality, the then 30-year-old robotics engineer from France decided to reprogram himself to become a blockchain developer because such developers were practically unheard of at the time. His intensive self-study paid off.

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Now, Guinot’s company, Jakarta-based OnlinePajak, is one of the fastest-growing start-ups in Indonesia, handling tax transactions worth US$3 billion last year. He expects the figure to reach US$7 billion in 2018, or roughly 10 per cent of the country’s total tax revenues.

Charles Guinot of OnlinePajak. Photo: Handout
Charles Guinot of OnlinePajak. Photo: Handout

OnlinePajak allows users to record their tax deposits and transactions with a few clicks instead of filing reams of paperwork. Since the platform is built on blockchain, all the information is secure against fraud.

Essentially, a blockchain is a digital ledger – a continuously growing list of records, called blocks, that are designed to be resistant to modification. Blockchains, which gained notoriety for their use as the foundation for cryptocurrency, enable information to be shared in peer-to-peer networks, and because data in any given block cannot be altered without altering all subsequent blocks, they can withstand fraud in highly corrupted environments.

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