Financial services firms and startups looking to be the bridge to blockchain ledgers continued to dominate presentations on the second and final day of the Blockchain Summit, ending International Blockchain Week in Shanghai that also saw Devcon2 and a startup demo competition. CME Group’s Daily and Reference Rates for BTC Heavyweight derivatives exchange CME Group, investment bank and financial services giant UBS, Russia’s largest bank Sberbank and other financial service firms spoke in the first half of the day. Sandra Ro of CME, the world’s largest futures exchange, officially announced the company’s daily and reference rates for bitcoin, aimed at helping the trade of the digital currency. The beta version is set to debut October 3. Ro said the firm started “quietly researching” bitcoin in 2012, and formalized its digitization group this year. She noted that $5.3 trillion in currencies are traded per day, compared with $50 million to $200 million in bitcoin. “If you asked a room of foreign traders how many people trade bitcoin, a small minority would raise hands,” she said, citing liquidity and regulator fears. CME hopes to be a bridge for foreign exchange traders, she said, an aim that would be echoed by several presenters. “If you think about trading bitcoin right now, it’s not really easy,” she said. “Not yet.” The State of Russian Adoption From the banking sector, Alex Batlin of UBS discussed blockchains in the industry, and Pavel Khodalev of Sberbank discussed the outlook in Russia among banks and the government. Khodalev noted how the central bank of Russia has interbank operations written to a blockchain, but said wider adoption is still hampered by a “chicken or the egg” problem regarding standards and regulations, as well as the question of whether to wait for clear standards to develop or to encourage […]
