SI-Chain was established by innovative technology provider company Hashnet in cooperation with Telemach, telecommunication solutions provider in november 2019. In this phase the technological solution provides transactions and creation of smart contracts. Hashnet technology is one of the highest speed and energy efficiency distributed ledger technologies on global level. Tadej Slapnik, director of Hashnet Slovenia emphasized that the ambition is to integrate technology into business models of the companies and public services, with highest possible range, high speed transactions.

Minister for Economic development and technology Mr. Zdravko Počivalšek emphasized the importance of the impact of blockchain technology for economic development, efficiency, productivity and competitiveness of slovenian economy. Ministry launched call for Demo/Pilot projects in 2018 funded from EU funds – 73 million Eur, which are allocated to the projects planning use of blockchain technology (in 65%) and AI (in 74%) and other converging technologies as well (IoT, big data, ML, predictive analytics, AR, VR, MR, 3D, …). The findings from this projects will also help slovenian government to create regulatory solutions for specific industrial verticals using blockchain, with the introduction of smart contract definition ito Slovenian Corporate law, and with the perspective to regulate digital entity and regulatory sandboxes for different fields of industry and public sector.

The success of slovenian blockchain companies is recognized worldwide. It was recognized by United nations, where Slovenia joined the Group of States, friends of digital technology, recognized as role model for cooperation of public and private sector in the field of development of blockchain solutions. European Commission recognized Slovenia as reliable partner, to be hosting the first pilot project – regional fund for AI and Blockchain startups in Europe.

Slovenia as one of most active countries on blockchain shows an evidence of growth of the use of emerging – key enabling technologies, which is important fact, and shows that the dynamics of technological development today is exeptional and the fastest in the whole human history. Therefore the humanization of technologies is another big issue the modern society will have to cope with, as emphasized by Zoran Poznič, Minister of Culture.
Why Slovenia?

After 2017, when Slovenian projects reached over 5% global investments in blockchain projects, Slovenia is facing a steady growth. The crowdfunding concept with the innitial coin offerings was one of the most important sources of financing for innovative projects, which were at develpoment stage and not reached the stage to be eligible for institutional financing. At that time the share of institutional financing was still quite high, but ICO investments were reached around 49% financing into startups. It boosted entrepreuniral activity in Slovenia among youngsters and refreshed the business environment in Slovenia. On the other hand, Slovenia has high amount of high skilled IT proffessionals which were engaged in those projects. The knowledge and the new markets boosted slovenian blockchain visibility and recognition, emphasized Nena Dokuzov, responsible for blockchain technologies at the Ministry of economic development and technology.