How a High-Tech Solution Can Bring Sanity Back to My Hometown of New York City

I can always rely on Washington Square Park at 6 a.m. to provide a glimpse into New York City’s dark underbelly. At sunrise, I discover small glassine envelopes with drug remnants among tiny shards of broken bottles of cheap vodka. In the midst of the flattened pizza boxes,  gauche hot-pink stickers call me over. They are promoting some local musicians, but they only succeed in defacing the park’s proud marble benches. And from time to time, make-shift memorials of burned-out candles, wilting flowers, and creased photos plead with me to give some mistreated social justice victims the eternal respect that we as a society failed to muster when they were alive. 

Our nation’s first president, George Washington, stands frozen in-time on the other side of the Arch, watching up Fifth Avenue, unable to spot the floating debris that party goers left in Jacob Wrey Mould’s iconic 150 year-old fountain. Nor can General Washington catch the sleeping bodies sprawled across the park’s lawns or the men and women huddled in the northwest corner congregating for their morning fix.

It seems like just yesterday when I didn't have to worry about my six-year-old daughter stepping on a used needle in Washington Square Park. Unfortunately, I am not the only one noticing the city’s precipitous decline. We have been witnessing an exodus since the beginning of the pandemic, and although I assumed it would taper off, it still persists. In fact, a newly released U.S. Census Bureau report found that the city’s population declined by 123,000 in 2022. No other major U.S. city even came close to suffering such a sad fate.

While New York City’s problems may seem intractable, city officials are already beginning to choose a new future by embracing blockchain technology. This will help the city climb out of this challenging period, which includes a record level of office vacancies, lower tax revenue, a rise in major felony offenses, and a broadening of the socio-economic divide. 

As a result, NYC’s public safety nets are depleted, including a shrinking police force and an increasingly dilapidated and unwelcoming public transit system. In the midst of such a predicament, it’s not surprising that New York City’s Mayor Eric Adams has been extremely vocal about the city’s inability to support the recent influx of nearly 100,000 asylum seekers.

Matthew C. Fraser, New York City’s chief technology officer, clearly understands how vital technology can be in rescuing a city like New York. Until recently, I didn’t even know that New York City had a chief technology officer but I had the pleasure of taking the stage after Mr. Fraser’s opening remarks at New York University’s first Summit on Cities and the Metaverse this past April.  

He is an impressive man with a bullish view of the future. He highlighted the need to provide lower economic neighborhoods with total access to Wi-Fi. This issue was exposed during the pandemic when many of our city’s children weren't able to access computers to learn from home. If we bring more hope to lower income neighborhoods, I can’t help but wonder how that will play out in places like Washington Square Park. Might there be fewer people living on the streets or strung out on drugs? Societal changes like these might not happen right away but over time, I do believe that children who receive a good education will be better off than their parents. 

In addition, Mayor Adams and Mr. Fraser have committed to creating digital wallets for all city employees by the end of 2023.  It’s exciting that the two of them embrace blockchain technology. They envision a NYC where legal documents will be filed on a blockchain and digital wallets can facilitate payments with cryptocurrency. 

At virtually no cost and simple to launch, digital wallets will have enormous implications when considering some of the serious problems plaguing NYC’s citizens. Anyone can set up and manage his own digital wallet without funds or a government-issued ID. The process is simple -  download an application on your mobile phone, and voila, you have your own digital wallet with all of its features, such as savings, transfers, and cryptocurrency payments. The payments element is a true game changer - Binance Pay already allows its customers to choose from more than seventy cryptocurrencies and settlements can be made in fiat currency.  

With nearly 33% – or roughly 1 million New Yorkers –  unable to open a bank account or apply for a credit card, I’m hoping that the access to money that a digital wallet will bring and the self esteem that comes with self sufficiency will lift more city residents out of poverty. People who are invested in their communities are less likely to deface public property or end up homeless.

Another innovation that is sure to make a difference is eliminating the archaic, costly, and mistake-prone county clerk’s office. Important records such as land deeds, automobile titles, leases, government issued IDs, and university diplomas will all eventually be filed on the blockchain.  Buyers and sellers will have the ability to consummate a transaction and transfer legal documents such as land deeds in real time. 

It will also modernize our city’s healthcare industry. Vital patient health records will soon be distributed across a private healthcare blockchain providing patients the ability to secure their confidential medical records, with a controllable digital gate that can be opened to third parties when authorized. 

Consider a situation, for example, where NYU Langone Hospital’s emergency room is faced with an incapacitated tourist or even a local homeless man who has been treated at the city’s hospitals many times before. The value a new healthcare provider will gain through instant access to the patients’ health data stored on a blockchain is immeasurable. Members of the medical community will be able to obtain immediate crucial information about the patients’ history, ultimately optimizing treatment while maintaining complete privacy within HIPPA’s guidelines.

I can’t say that blockchain technology will eradicate all the problems I see on my morning run through Washington Square Park –  homelessness, public drug use, the defacement of property, socio-economic inequity. But I do know this: Every other industrial revolution has left the city more prosperous in its wake. And so, I have to believe that this too will pass. 

Glossary

To keep things simple and to make sure we are speaking the same language, here are a few definitions:

Blockchain: a system that records transactions, including cryptocurrency payments, on a decentralized peer-to-peer ledger network of computers.

Cryptocurrency:  a form of digital currency with transactional records verified and maintained on a blockchain. 

Non-Fungible Tokens: (NFTs) are digital assets that can be permanently minted on a blockchain.  NFTs often take shape in the form of digital art, music, fashion, etc.

Digital wallets: store digital assets, including cryptocurrency and NFTs.