Written by Matthew Dove (Digital Editor) with contributions by Charley Brooke Barnett (Editorial Assistant)
Launched in June 2015, two years shy of the cryptocurrency boom of Dec ‘17, London Blockchain Week (née Blockchain London Conference) has seen it all. It returned today at the Grange Tower Bridge Hotel and whilst numbers were a little thin on the ground in the wake of a year-long bear market, the mood was still buoyant.
The most bullish member of day one’s delegation was Dr. Bo Ji (Assistant Dean CKGSB Cheung Kong Graduate School of Business) who was so enthused about that state of China’s economy that he forgot to talk about blockchains!
In a country where 85% of people don’t have a bank account, Callum Holmes of the Bank of Papa New Guinea highlighted the benefits of implementing DLT technology. He spoke of establishing trust in the local community, the importance of focusing on the benefits of the technology, not the tech itself and of the need to adopt a ‘Keep Going’ approach when tackling future obstacles.
Good job then that Radix CEO, Piers Ridyard, spoke of nothing else as he outlined his company’s three-pronged approach to establishing a viable platform for the production tokens. They are;
- Scalability – sharding of related transactions to allow for huge volume without a reduction in speed and
A chain for every block and a TFT for every seat reliability
- Buildability – API driven model to reduce reliance on complex or unnecessary smart contracts when creating tokens
- Volatility – ever-shifting prices might be good for speculators but they’re bad for businesses, Radix aims to quell instability by controlling the supply of its internal token
On the Blockchain, Finance & Enterprise Panel Danielle Khayat Saikaly (Senior Lecturer, Europe Business School) lead a dynamic panel of Adi Ben-Ari (Founder & CEO, Applied Blockchain), Ajit Tripathi (Partner, Consensys) and Anthony Woolley (Head of Innovation, Societe Generale). All three concurred that securingand storing digitised assets would keep the blockchain busy in 2019 as well as giving rise to “interesting financial instruments” which sounded about as ominous as they are vague.
In the afternoon, Guido Augusto Quaranta (CEO & Founder, Sesicio.com & Investoland) waxed lyrical about the digitisation of cattle before Eric Van der Kleij (CEO, C4DR) moderated a discussion between Jonny Fry (CEO, TeamBlockchain) and Peter Smith (Principal, FinTechReguLab) on the ebbing of regulatory tides.
Fry spoke of “embedding controls” into new tokenised products which would allow for real-time compliance and oversight, whilst Smith championed the development of voluntary industry standards to placate regulators.
The hysteria of 2017 may have dissipated but the potential of blockchain technology is still very much in evidence…
