It's Just Technology
Block.one is the company behind the EOSIO blockchain, which is the brainchild of CTO Dan Larimer. The company bills EOSIO as “The most powerful infrastructure for decentralized applications.”
Brendan Blumer is the founder and CEO of Block.one and in the above video he discusses the company’s $1 billion investment to foster the expansion of their blockchain.
Eventually (in the not-too-distant future), blockchain will impact most commerce. It will make business and operations more efficient, more accountable, more transparent and less expensive.
The rise of cryptocurrencies as a speculative asset, culminating at the end of 2017, as well as the crypto bear market of 2018, may dominate the hype cycle, but the real work of blockchain development is still in an early stage of changing the world.
In terms of blockchain as a base platform for practical applications, the financial technology sector has captured a chunk of the spotlight and the battle lines are being drawn for a new era. How much (or little) traditional banks and governments will be able to influence global exchange of value is in the process of being determined.
However, all sectors can, and ultimately will, be influenced by blockchain.
On a fundamental level, blockchains cut out expensive middlemen such as banks and lawyers, so the opportunities for increased productivity are significant.
In relation to marketing, the following article, 7 Ways to Build Your Brand with Blockchain Marketing, suggests a new marketing paradigm:
By contrast, the blockchain offers a different approach to digital ads and marketing. The decentralized, peer-to-peer model brings the customer into equal, dynamic dialogues with businesses, and lets customers generate monetized marketing content for their favorite brands through that engagement. This implies that in the earned media blockchain ecosystem, we are all equal and active partners.
Perhaps one of the more interesting opportunities for marketers is the promise of bypassing advertising middlemen, such as Google and Facebook, and putting messages directly in front of those who are interested. At a reduced cost, no less. In fact, the ad payments would go to those consuming the messages. (And/or those creating messages for the brand).
Of course, in the same way that banks are going to do their best to stay relevant, by placing themselves within the blockchain, advertising middlemen, Google, Facebook, et al, will do the same. It seems probable that their ban on crypto ads this year is an attempt to pause the momentum so they can evaluate the space to their advantage.
I do not suspect that Google and Facebook will go away (although some other intermediaries probably will). They need ad revenue to survive and they’ll figure out some way to maintain a slice of that pie. However, expect that names of companies with whom we are yet not familiar, will come to be just as well known, and perhaps more so, for no other reason than providing more value for less cost.
Regardless of how the advertising media landscape plays out, marketers and consumers will win.
Dan Larimer, CTO of EOS, discusses his latest blockchain in this video, which is edited from a number of presentations.
Larimer is noted for creating two earlier, and still popular decentralized blockchains:
From those projects he conceived what he considers to be a better platform, which has led to his current development of EOS.
Philosophically, he was inspired by free markets, Austrian economics and Ron Paul. As a result he wanted to create systems that would provide freedom and are nonviolent.
Larimer’s life mission in to “Find free market solutions for securing life, liberty and property.”
Hence, we need money that is not controlled by a central authority.
He recognized the vulnerability of crypto exchanges, which could be shut down by governments, cutting the flow of digital currencies.
From that he created Bitshares (BTS) a Decentralized Asset Exchange. But that wasn’t up to the task of handling the required scalability.
He created Steem, a blockchain social media platform that rewards users for creating content. Transactions on Steem are free. But it moved away from a core principle of true decentralization.
Larimer is no longer involved with Bitshares or Steem and both of those platforms are doing well.
However, from his perspective, the industry has much to learn and with his past experience and ongoing learning he is building EOS for the purpose of establishing future applications on top of it with the intention that anyone, including himself, could develop on it.
EOS enables developers to build decentralized applications in a general purpose way, which are compatible with sustainable growth.
EOS is an open source platform that anyone can use to develop high-performance, decentralized, blockchain smart contracts.
In brief, for many small- to mid-sized companies, the answer is “No.” You don’t need to create a blockchain. You don’t even need blockchain.
Yet.
Although blockchain will likely become ubiquitous across the spectrum of business and commerce, ultimately various blockchain networks will be provided as pre-made platforms which will be faster, more transparent and less expensive than traditional services that blockchain aims to replace.
For those of us over a certain age, we may recall when credit cards were novel. There was a period of many years when credit card transactions were evolving to become common in all businesses, large and small.
Consider Paypal, a more recent addition to the online transaction world, which was founded in 1998 (initially as Confinity). Paypal was not intended as way to replace credit cards, it merely facilitated their use for small business online and now there are a few hundred million users
However, blockchain will likely be integrated into world commerce and operations at a much faster rate and will eclipse the impact of credit cards and Paypal.
So why all the hype?
Continue reading “Does Your Company Need to Create a Blockchain?”
As blockchain technology evolves from hype to practical applications, the reality that banks (among many other middleman businesses) could become less relevant to the future of financial transactions has not been lost to those same stolid institutions.
In brief, blockchain offers the opportunity to transact finance faster, more transparently and less expensively than the services banks provide. In fact, technically speaking, banks are not required. Hence traditional banks have not been primary participants in the massive global movement of cryptocurrencies in the past few years. In that light, the reality that traditional banking, as an industry, is at risk in the not-too-distant future is more real than at any point in the past.
Highlighting the point is The Financial Times reporting that JPMorgan has widened blockchain payments to more than 75 banks.
The article states that, “More than 75 of the world’s biggest banks are turning to blockchain to fight the threat of new payments rivals in what will be the regulated banking industry’s largest application of the distributed ledger technology underpinning cryptocurrencies.”
None of this would surprise those familiar with blockchain tech. But it might be surprising to those who don’t follow such developments that all the good, bad and ugly surrounding Bitcoin has real-world implications.
For all of us, our options for transacting value should continue to increase even more in the future. Simultaneously, traditional banking should become less expensive.
Although it’s hard to envision a world where traditional banking will go away, it’s also conceivable that an all-out legal battle will ensue to mitigate loss of money and power that banks and their government partners have long enjoyed.
I would expect the blockchain circus to move from the hype of speculative irrationality to the world of courts and jurisprudence at the same time as blockchain starts to take steps towards the disintermediation of the legal profession.
We live in interesting times.
The process that brings food from farm to table includes cooperation between many entities along the way.
The IBM Food Trust represents a collaborative network of growers, processors, wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, retailers and others using blockchain to increase transparency and accountability in each step along the food supply path.
IBM describes this platform as “The only active network of its kind that directly connects participants through a permissioned, permanent and shared record of food origin details, processing data, shipping details and more.”
Ali Bouzari, cited as a Culinary Scientist and Educator, describes IBM’s Food Trust as a blockchain system that consists of digitizing information about the food supply chain in a way that’s indelible, in a way that is searchable, for instant access to records that we can have faith in.
Let’s be real. The crypto world needs traditional banks. In spite of the promise (or hope) of ultimate disintermediation of the banking system, we still live in the world of fiat currencies.
And even in a best case scenario of crypto become the default global currency, that would take some number of years.
In the mean time, Switzerland wants to become a central banking hub for the crypto universe.
Hence, the Swiss Bankers Association (SBA) have established operational guidelines for doing business with cryptocurrency or blockchain-based startups.
“According to the guidelines, banks should implement adequate know your customer (KYC) and anti-money laundering (AML) measures, before opening accounts for blockchain businesses.”
https://thenextweb.com/hardfork/2018/09/21/switzerland-cryptocurrency-banks-guidelines/
Jed McCaleb is the CTO of the Stellar network. He states that Stellar was inspired by Bitcoin and in a lot of ways is complementary to it.
McCaleb notes that Bitcoin is focused more on the currency aspect of things, whereas Stellar is focused on how to make a common language between different financial institutions and currencies.
It would make Bitcoin interoperable with dollars or Euros or Pesos and many others and all these currencies can be easily traded with each other.
In other words, Stellar is a blockchain that enables users to send money to anyone in the world, for fractions of a penny, instantly, and in any currency.
From the Blockchain Futurist Conference in August 2018, Toronto, Canada.
The panel opened with a depiction of blockchain being the most over-hyped market ever, but that regardless of the hype, there’s a truly legitimate and immense opportunity.
Although blockchain’s future is bright, we’re still in the early phase. Technology and regulations are trying to catch up.
Very smart people are starting to solve technical and use-case matters.
The panel discussed regulatory issues and that it’s just a matter of time before governments establish regulation.
There was also discussion of blockchain moving away from tokenization and evolving further as a pure problem-solving technology.
This panel discussion was held in Toronto at the Blockchain Futurist Conference in August 2018.
Panel speakers include Andrew Kiguel (Hut 8), Michael Bucella (BlockTower), Eric So (Globalive Technology) and Michael Hyatt (Hyatt Family Office). The discussion was moderated by Christine Lee, (Co-Founder & Head of Media, Blockchain Advisory Group).
Hyatt stated that people who were raising money via ICO’s in 2017 were doing something akin to crowdfunding. The future of blockchain financing is “show me” that you can make money, just don’t tell me you have a good idea.
Continue reading “The Future of Financing Blockchain”