New York electronic exchange Nasdaq has partnered with Estonian government to introduce a blockchain-based e-voting service on the online platform e-Residency. This will help shareholders to manage their companies.

Nasdaq will run the service on e-Residency for shareholders of the companies listed on Nasdaq's Tallinn Stock Exchange, the country's only regulated securities market. This is the second experiment with the blockchain technology for the American exchange, after Nasdaq Linq, a platform for managing the transfer of securities for private companies.

Estonian authentication system e-Residency launched a year ago encourages anyone to become an e-resident and to sign documents and contracts digitally, establish a business in Estonia online, conduct e-banking and declare Estonian taxes. For digital authentication of applicants, Estonian government collects fingerprints and perform further checks. All e-residents get an ID card for online identification and verification activities.

The new service is supposed to facilitate corporate governance of companies for shareholders from any part of the world. Submitted votes will be safely recorded in the distributed ledger. The pilot version is to appear later this year.

“Estonia's robust information society and forward thinking coupled with the agility its size affords, creates a unique opportunity to premiere the e-voting pilot in Estonia. We're excited to see the development of this project over the coming months, and look forward to working closely with the government of Estonia to set a transformative example of the future of governance,” said Hans-Ole Jochumsen, President of Nasdaq.

Sonya Belova