![]() Either way, the presence of blockchain is forcing progress. It may actually be preferable simply to upgrade incumbent systems on existing centralised databases using apps, or to use a more centralised permissioned blockchain-which isn’t that different to the systems that exist today. Whilst blockchain networks are ideally suited to large multi-party networks with significant agreements to move ownership rights, the eventual solution may not be a new, decentralised blockchain company. The most bullish estimates suggest this could free up over US$1 trillion of cost from the system. Thus paper methods move to digital, saving significant operational costs, increasing efficiencies and speed and also releasing collateral capital from the system. 5 Blockchain competition is encouraging banks, commodity firms and shippers to group together, standardise and digitise their processes in ways that previously proved elusive. A good example is supply chain finance, a US$16 trillion industry 4 with an all-too-common reliance on archaic paper forms and stamps. Pressure from blockchain on incumbents could alter current competitive industry dynamics and encourage co-operation among natural competitors-or ‘co-opetition’. We believe that the properties of blockchain can pressure existing industries to become higher quality and can also allow the creation of new quality businesses, which centralised system economics have so far failed to achieve. We believe that this innovation in verification and in networking economics has implications for the long-term outlook of moats around the returns of some quality companies and how they do business today. Blockchain networks can be built up over time far more cheaply, using incentives for users, investors and developers, with both the security and the value of the network itself scaling as the network grows. If you wanted to build a new centralised payment network today, it would entail very high startup technology and security costs. Blockchain database structures allow for one central “source of truth”, a ledger, to be distributed across many parties that can store a copy of it, access it and add to it.īlockchain also has the theoretical ability to lower the barriers to entry to building a new network. Blockchain technology could enable such transfers more quickly and cheaply, in ways that are more easily auditable by all parties involved. This is the reason cross-border remittances are slow and costly. Verification costs are even higher when multiple parties need to verify/audit the transfer of assets through a chain of correspondent bank ledgers across borders. In more tangible terms, today when you use digital money on a debit or credit card to buy something, banks and payment networks extract fees for verifying you are good for the money you are giving to the merchant in exchange for a particular product or service. ![]() ![]() Its presence and properties could theoretically lower the costs of verification and network construction in the economy. It also allows for the creation of automatically-executing ‘smart’ contracts and programmable money-which we explain later. This new database structure facilitates the transfer of value between parties over the internet without a central authority. Without getting into how blockchains work, the key concept is that they are a new type of database architecture with the potential to disintermediate many existing business models, particularly, but not exclusively, in financial services. Whilst blockchain was initially a consumer-led innovation, dismissed by professional investors and regulators, a recently renamed social media company’s 2019 digital currency project was a turning point the potential of a well-funded company with over a billion users to create a more or less instantly scaled, systemically important private currency was a wake-up call. It is also surrounded by a huge amount of noise from fringe libertarian followers, and the system is rife with hype from fraudsters. For many, blockchain is a difficult field to get comfortable with because it sits somewhere between economics, cryptography/database construction, theoretical statistics, and sometimes even philosophy- academic disciplines of which few people have a combined understanding. regulator, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).īitcoin is underpinned by blockchain. 3 An ETF which directly owns Bitcoin (rather than Bitcoin futures) still awaits approval from the U.S. Last month the first a bitcoin-linked exchange traded fund (ETF) was finally launched, becoming the fastest ever ETF to reach US$1 billion of assets.
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