Telangana Web 3.0 Regulatory Sandbox to begin in February

A governing council, advisory board and the operations team to give direction, to advise on the business aspects and to manage the day-to-day affairs are already in place for the regulatory sandbox.

Hyderabad: In a few weeks, the Web 3.0 Regulatory Sandbox that the Telangana Government proposed in December will be ready. The State’s Emerging Technologies wing mooted the Sandbox to provide stakeholders in the Web 3.0 ecosystem a platform to test their product and get it validated by regulators.

A governing council, advisory board and the operations team to give direction, to advise on the business aspects and to manage the day-to-day affairs are already in place for the regulatory sandbox.

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“We have now received about 20 applications from various stakeholders. They are from fintech, healthcare and others. The focus is on using artificial intelligence to solve societal level problems,” L Rama Devi, Director Emerging Technologies, said.

These wings will have representatives from the government, industry, investor community and will guide the companies on addressing the problems as also scaling them up. Depending on the requirement, there will be a representative from the respective regulatory body to assess the use cases, she said.

For instance, if it is a fintech idea, the effort will be to participate from the RBI.

“We will have experts from that domain as well. We hope to formally start the first cohort in February,” she said. The startups or participating companies will have six months to work on their ideas.

“We will also assess if the use cases submitted really need a regulatory sandbox approach or not. There will also be members from the user community who will do the testing. They can give feedback to startups on features, functionality and ease of use,” she said.

Web3 ecosystem partners had flagged the regulatory ambiguity that prevented them from bringing out new creative solutions and developing new products. The Government, through the Web 3.0 Regulatory Sandbox, she said, will enable firms to test and learn in a live environment. The aim is to accelerate innovation in the Web 3.0 industry by facilitating robust testing mechanisms and support required by firms. Innovations that can be tested include new products, services, solutions, business models, and even policies.

The State Government has earlier partnered with Devfolio to conduct large scale Web 3.0 events in Hyderabad. One such event, EthforAll, is planned in February with focus on ‘Public Goods’.

The Telangana effort assures startups, domain experts and others of more doors opening up for them at national level and even beyond. While the participants can navigate the regulatory space, the sandbox also helps the regulators to understand the barriers to beneficial innovation. The Sandbox will operate in a continuous format.

Observations on regulatory policies will be passed on to regulatory bodies. Wherever necessary, State-level policies will be drafted to implement findings from the Sandbox, she said.

Rama Devi was recently identified as one of the three ‘Women in AI’ by Google at its annual event Google for India. “I am happy about the recognition. I think this will inspire a few women to choose technology as a tool to improve the lives of common people. The recognition is a responsibility. I will continue to focus on identifying technology use cases and working on solutions for people good. That has been the approach we have also followed,” she said.