Crypto

We had a really interesting meeting about digital identity, blockchain and the Calais Jungle at The Financial Services Club recently from Jaz and Nils O’Hara of the Worldwide Tribe. One member of  the Club, Nick Swanson of ObjectTech, was so taken with it that he blogged about it.  Thanks Nick and he’s kindly allowed me…

Many of the people I meet believe that bitcoin is bad and will fail.  It’s rare to meet anyone who says that it could change the world and will succeed.  But I’ve found one and he happens to have written a very good blog about it: Akin Fernandez, Entrepreneur Developer of Azteco. It’s a long read,…

I didn’t realise until the other day that the Bank of England has a blog Bank Underground.  Finally, a boring old British bank with a blog.  Not a consumer bank of course – none of those blog – but a good old central bank. The Bank makes clear it’s not the opinions of the institution…

I recently opened an investment fund for blockchain start-ups in partnership with Life.SREDA, who produce a report on the state of FinTech twice a year.  The latest report, almost 300 pages of analysis, provide more insights of the first half of the year in FinTech [Money of the Future 1H’2016 and Chinese, Korean and Japanese…

Here are our key posts for the past week … Applying Blockchain to Clearing and Settlement I’ve talked a lot about blockchain, but not much lately about the use cases, of which four stand out in terms of real activity: Clearing and Settlement, Trade Finance, Payments and Digital Identity.  I thought I’d do a deeper dive…

I can’t finish writing my blockchain and DLT dialogue without wrapping up the missing bits.  This blog series is not meant to be an exhaustive list of every company and every use case, just the ones that stand out for me in a banking context.  There are others such as syndicated loans, compliance and more…

Digital identity is a complex area, as discussed yesterday.  First, it is focused upon shared ledgers and blockchain, not just blockchain; second, it needs to have some permission basis; third, we need to have a structure agreed for who is providing permissions; and fourth, it is a structural challenge for industry and government, rather than…

In my final deep dive into blockchain use cases, I come to digital identity.  Now this is a thorny area for three reasons. First, we need to understand what we mean by identity before we can talk about how blockchains could help. Second, we need to understand the difference between blockchain and shared ledgers which,…

There are a number of base blockchain platforms that are important in the payments sphere, with the three leading players being Bitcoin, Ethereum and Ripple.  These are the base development platforms, rather than a payments service per se, and choosing which to use is intriguing as they all offer something different.  Bearing in mind that…

I’ve blogged for over a week about blockchain based developments in Clearing & Settlement and Trade Finance, and will continue for another week talking about the developments in Payments and Digital Identity.  However, at this point, I should clarify that I use the term blockchain as an overall term to describe what is happening.  I…