One of the key sectors to adopt blockchain technology will likely be government regulatory agencies, says Austin Hill, Blockstream CEO, in a recent Bloomberg TV interview. Bloomberg TV host Angie Lau interviewed Hill on “First Up.”
Blockstream has developed a blockchain “sidechain” technology to bringing cross-chain functionality between the bitcoin blockchain and other public and private blockchains. The company recently raised $55 million in Series A funding, bringing the total capital raised in its funding run to $76 million, CCN reported. Why All The Blockchain Excitement?
Lau asked Hill why people are so excited about blockchain technology. “It’s a fundamental shift in how the underpinnings of how finance work, moving much more to an open, permission-less innovation platform,” he said. He compared it to early Internet innovation. Technology used in bitcoin will be used to rethink the protocols for finance.
Hill said there are several reasons for the level of blockchain excitement. “I think people are beginning to realize that some of the underpinnings of our finance system have not changed in 20 years,” he said. “Wire transfers, international remittances, post-trade settlement, the entire way that banks and finance organizations do netting, a lot of issues around how stock and assets are traded and actually tracked which led to some of the problems in 2008 of systemic risk.”
Tasks that took hours, days, weeks and even months can now be done in seconds, he noted. “We’re changing how the actual ledger works. It offers huge cost savings for financial organizations in the area of regulatory compliance, trust with other organizations because right now there’s a huge amount of reconciliation that has to occur where everyone has their own copy of the ledger and no one agrees.”
Lau noted that Blockstream, at two years old, is one of the oldest blockchain industry players. […]
