If Bob Cohen has his way, Mansfield won’t be left out of a regional blockchain initiative.Cohen of Braintree Business Development Center spoke about Mansfield’s potential role in Blockland Cleveland Tuesday, Sept. 4 at the monthly Richland Community Development Group meeting. “The idea (is) that Cleveland and northeast Ohio could be an epicenter of blockchain activity,” Cohen saidThe initiative has been led by Bernie Moreno, a Cleveland area car dealer, who imagines the region as a hub for blockchain technology, which is likely best known for its use with Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Cleveland, Akron, Ashland and Mansfield all have representatives currently involved.“One of the questions that came up has been how ‘Cleveland-centric’ this effort is. I met last week with Dean Elad Granot of Ashland University’s Dauch College of Business and Economics to specifically ask if the effort was intended to be regional and he said, ‘Yes, definitely,’” Cohen said in an email. Granot is the co-chair of the BlockLand entrepreneurship committee. But Cohen hopes to see even more involvement from Mansfield in the coming months.“I don’t want them to someday say, we tried to make it regional, but nobody came,” Cohen said at the RCDG meeting.The next meeting about Blockland Cleveland is set for Friday, Sept. 21 in Cleveland and is open to people who are interested. They should contact Bob Leach at Braintree for more details.Later this year, from Dec. 1 to 4, the organization has planned Cleveland’s first international blockchain conference at the Huntington Convention CenterCohen related blockchain’s information tracking capabilities to Carfax.“This keeping track of everything is not a new concept; it kind of reminds me of Carfax, where you can look up everything that’s ever happened to that car, but what makes it a little bit different is this distributive nature, that it’s stored on hundreds of thousands of computers,” he said.This makes it more difficult for information to be hacked, as it is stored on thousands of computers, Cohen explained. Read more about this initiative at blocklandcleveland.com