During a week of back-to-back and overlapping fintech events around the capital, a common theme emerged – recognition of the hype surrounding blockchain.
Monday saw a degree of fanfare as Barclays Smart Contract Templates starred in the first public demo of R3’s Corda platform at a stadium setting . Wednesday (20 th April) had the likes of DAH’s Blythe Masters, Ethereum’s Vitalik Buterin and R3’s Richard Brown roll up their sleeves and talk about the reality of this technology.
Starting with the Swift Business Forum 2016 at Tobacco Dock, Blythe Masters, CEO, Digital Asset Holdings, described a challenging, less-leveraged, post financial crisis environment where capital requirements have gone up unabated. Into that environment an entrenched financial services sector has come under attack from a new generation of technology and entrepreneurs.
She said the reason for the intensity of the focus on blockchain technology is because of the intensity of the need, and the significance of the opportunity. "I think the incentives and the catalysts for that change exist now. And that’s why you are seeing so much noise around this space. I often get asked the question: is this really just hype or is there something there. The answer is there is plenty of hype and there’s also something there.
"One of the first times in history it’s possible to think about mutualising and sharing financial infrastructure in a way that its security is enhanced, relative to the status quo. Blockchain or distributed ledger technology is all about the ability to share and mutualise common infrastructure, rather than keeping separate renditions of proprietary infrastructure and then wasting billions reconciling the inevitable resulting differences.
"To mutualise and share financial infrastructure is the opportunity to eliminate extremely significant components of the post-trade financial manufacturing cost base, if you will. In an environment with compressed ROEs, that’s […]
