Thank you for your comments, Mr. Lemire.
Blockchain technology is a data certification and integrity technology. Over time, as blockchain technology emerged, we saw that there was confusion between the notary, a public officer, and the notary public. Quebec notaries are not the first in the civil law tradition. In fact, French and Italian notaries are similar. We developed a whole smart contract mechanism, among other things.
We know that blockchain technology has three main advantages. The first is the automation of transactions. The second is the certification of data, which in my opinion is the ideal technology for registries containing sensitive information. The third is the possibility of dematerializing shares into tokens to do business on a global scale.
We are therefore in the process of prototyping and implementing a notary blockchain, which will be done in three phases. One of the phases will involve automating notarial contracts. Because of the COVID‑19 crisis, notaries are now notarizing digitally and that will continue. We are integrating smart contracts, which will help save a lot of time. Obviously, this is all being done for the benefit of Quebeckers. In another phase, notaries will use certain types of tokens to dematerialize property, shares and intellectual property rights.
Basically, that is what we have planned for the coming months.