Crypto

I’ve noticed a great deal of schadenfreude related to the R3 bump.  Lots of people saying that blockchain is past its sell-by date, R3 are bust and distributed ledgers are dead.  I think it’s related to the journalists who, having delighted in bigging up blockchain big time for the past two years are now relishing…

An interesting week as R3 goes through restructuring.   Santander and Goldman Sachs leave and the Monetary Authority of Singapore, a regulator, join.  Interesting. Since R3 arrived on the scene in 2014, it has been a train of technology.  The consortium started on September 15, 2015 with 9 financial companies: Barclays, BBVA, Commonwealth Bank of Australia,…

I’m a big fan of Kraken, the digital currency exchange in California, as it’s my main exchange for investing in digital assets.  If you want to know more, checkout their general overview at the end of this blog.  I’m also a fan of their blog, which regularly sends me interesting stuff and they’ve just launched…

It’s the end of the first full day of Money 20/20 2016, and it’s been a mixed day starting with a surprisingly packed room for my discussion with Moven, Simple and ING about digital banking. The story of the fish seemed popular (see last week’s blog). Banks are like this fish. @Chris_Skinner #Money2020 pic.twitter.com/iHsR6PiQY7 —…

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…