Two global banking leaders, a banking consortium and a newly minted limited-purpose trust company gathered onstage at the Consensus 2016 conference in New York City to discuss the future of blockchain technology among global financial institutions. Moderated by business editor of The Economist Matthew Bishop, he lead the panel by proposing three possible futures of blockchain technology and asking the panelists to weigh in on the distributed ledger’s fate. Bishop indicated he believes blockchain could either “get rid of a lot of intermediaries”, lead to incumbents owning the technology, or lastly, that it could all be hype. The former chief executive of SWIFT Americas and current business development officer for Digital Asset Holdings (DAH), Chris…
Blockchain startup Chain is today releasing a new open-source, permissioned protocol built in collaboration with 10 financial and telecom firms. Partners on the project include an impressive list of major financial firms, such as Capital One, Citi, Fidelity, First Data, Fiserv, Mitsubishi UFJ, Nasdaq, Orange, State Street and Visa, all of which contributed to the technology, called the Chain Open Standard, or Chain OS 1. In interview, Chain CEO Adam Ludwin asserts the platform is tailor-made for high-scale financial applications, including securities clearing and payment processing. Long in development, Ludwin described the release as a formalization of the platform it has used on test projects for First Data, Nasdaq and Visa, among other partners. Ludwin told…
Infosys will become the latest IT services giant to announce the introduction of a blockchain offering through its EdgeVerve Systems subsidiary today at its Infosys Confluence conference in San Francisco. Called the EdgeVerve Blockchain Framework, the product is aimed at furthering the adoption of blockchain tech in the financial services sector. Built on a permissioned distributed ledger, Infosys said the product will allow banks to “rapidly deploy” blockchain services, among other benefits. In promotional materials, EdgeVerve described the distributed ledger platform as asset-agnostic, highly extensible and best suited for “minimizing operating and per-transaction costs for financial services”. The company continued: “Designed specifically for…
UK banking giant Barclays took another step toward positioning itself at the forefront of innovators in the blockchain sector last week with the news it had become the first to trial Corda, a new distributed ledger platform from partner R3CEV. The prototype, demoed at the Barclays Accelerator in London last week, follows a particularly active period for Barclays, which earlier this month revealed it would provide banking services to blockchain payments startup Circle, and earlier this year, participated in a test of a private version of the Ethereum blockchain with 11 R3 member banks. In interview, Dr Lee Braine of the Investment Bank CTO Office at Barclays, spoke to what it described as a broader need for leadership from the banking industry should the industry…
William Mougayar is a Toronto-based entrepreneur, investor and advisor to Consensus 2016, CoinDesk’s flagship conference. He is also the author of the upcoming book, The Business Blockchain. In this opinion piece, Mougayar discusses the common ways that enterprise businesses are seeking to establish and roll out blockchain strategies as part of their innovation initiatives. Despite its rising importance in finance and business, the blockchain is not going to make a big impact until it reaches the highest level of corporate echelons, the boardroom. While some boards have been discussing the blockchain, the nature of these discussions means they often treat their subject matter as a curiosity. Boards with blockchain visionaries driving innovative agendas…