Blockchain Part 1: PayExpo 2016

By Dylan Jones

Another topic which possesses particular gravitas was blockchain technology. Having a lot of time allocated to discussing it, it came as no surprise to feature many prestigious speakers and companies.

During the second day of PayExpo speakers Gene Vayngrib, CEO of Tradle, and Jon Matonis, founding director at Bitcoin Foundation, were the primary drivers behind the blockchain discussions.  Both speakers had different insights onto how the technology is currently being developed, where it should be placed to help businesses the most and potential future hopes for the technology.

According to Matonis; “blockchain has made its way to central banking” which is a huge deal. This means that this technology is truly disrupting the way in which financial services are going about their own, ageing technology, and are in real discussions on how best to incorporate technologies that are in the emerging market with a serious attitude.

It was discussed that the roots of blockchain, primarily, came to life as a by-product of Bitcoin. This cryptocurrency is doing remarkable things within the finance industry.

“The computeral power of Bitcoin is more powerful than companies such as Visa and Mastercard. With roughly 240,000 transactions per day, the currency has become a determined contender in the payments sector.”

From this continued heavy use of the cryptocurrency a lot of problems that it initially had in regards to security and marketability are now being ironed out. Since its rise to power, alternatives to Bitcoin have both been theorised and made.

“The Bank of England proposed the RS Coin in order to make the UK go cashless. This may not have been decentralised which is a bastardisation of the technology” according to Matonis.

The reason for these technologies being of such importance is because it has the potential to imitate the growth we saw with TCP, IP and even HTTP had. With such a potentially valuable technology Matonis urged companies to have public blockchains as if they don’t they’ll inevitably end up siloing themselves in a similar way when independent companies tried to produce their own intranets during the birth of the internet.

The Bitcoin political protocol has the chance to outlive governments as well as competitors and is currently pushing the world towards liquidity of payments, at least in the eyes of Vayngrib and Matonis.