CoinCorner comments on State Street’s job cuts to adjust blockchain strategy: ‘Businesses would be wise to listen to Bitcoin developers’

CoinCorner’s CEO, Danny Scott, commented:

“It’s very unfortunate that people in the DLT team at State Street have lost their jobs recently, but it’s not unexpected. Large companies around the world have all been dipping their toes into this industry over the last few years, attempting to use some of the technology behind Bitcoin to solve their problems.

Having been involved in the Bitcoin industry for the past 7 years, I’ve seen the progression of the industry and people’s thinking processes in this time, along with seeing how companies spend vast resources to research potential solutions to their own business problems. The progression has gone from Bitcoin to Altcoins, Blockchain, Smart Contracts, Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT), ICOs, Stablecoins, and now Digital Assets, as companies try to use Bitcoin’s technology to solve other problems.

What people are actually looking for, the “killer app”, is Bitcoin itself – it’s an incredibly powerful, decentralised, reliable, and unhackable base layer due to its principles which allow layers to be built on top. Let’s take the internet as a similar example of where this structure exists already. The internet is a foundation layer that has had everything built on top of it that we use today; this includes the likes of websites, email, social media, TV streaming, and more. I envision the future for Bitcoin to be like this too.

Unfortunately, in order to solve their own problems, the likes of State Street has been attempting to reinvent the wheel when it comes to Bitcoin. This has been done regardless of the advice given by those with experience in the Bitcoin industry. Advice including that Blockchain technology (or DLT as some have tried to rebrand it to) is just one small piece of the technology behind Bitcoin and that by taking this one piece out, companies are preventing it from working in a usable, efficient manner.

I can appreciate that these businesses want to do the R&D themselves, but they would be wise to listen to Bitcoin developers and recognise that time after time over the last 7 years, it has always come back to Bitcoin”.