Brendan Blumer, the 32-year-old CEO of Block.one, a Cayman Islands-registered software development firm that helped create EOS, one of the leading platforms for deploying decentralized applications (dApps), has said that in its simplest form, blockchain technology is “a [very] secure way to send and store data.”

Blumer, who’s also the founder of ii5, a company that “elevates, trains, and supports Indian Realtors through software and services,” noted that the ongoing development of blockchain-based platforms could “ultimately lead to an infrastructure rebuild of the internet as we know it today.”

Blumer Speaking At The DC Blockchain Summit

Blumer, whose comments came during the 4th annual DC Blockchain Summit (held on March 6-7), compared the early growth and adoption of the internet to that of the nascent crypto sector. Expressing views similar to other prominent business leaders, Blumer mentioned that regulators, for the most part, were careful not to interfere too much as individuals and organizations throughout the world worked to build the internet of today.

The crypto entrepreneur remarked:

[While the internet was being developed,] regulators allowed innovation to flourish – which was absolutely the right strategy. But, the [internet] was really being built on fundamentally insecure rails. If the rails had been secure, we would not need things like PayPal to sit between me and you and I transfer you money. It also means that a lot of centralized technology platforms are architected now in an inferior way. [The reason for this is that] it was built under the assumption that all data transfer and storage was fundamentally insecure.

Databases Are More Transparent Because Of Blockchains

He continued:

[We’re] working with a new building block now that allows us to much more securely and confidently send and store data in a way that we know is reaching point A to point B without being intercepted, without being decrypted. And then through transparency, [crypto ledgers] create an immutability-like dynamic because its open-sourcing the databases on the backend. [This allows] everyone to see all the types of activities that are going on these databases.

Elaborating on the transparent nature of blockchain-based data storage systems, Blumer noted: “What that means is that if there’s a change in those databases, or there’s a change to how things are calculated … everyone can see that it happened… so it’s opening up the backend” activities of your database and sharing the information publicly to allow for greater transparency and accountability.

Going on to explain what cryptocurrencies actually are, a concept which is still confusing to many, Blumer said:

Cryptocurrencies are really just a unit of account. They’re just like an Excel spreadsheet because you can use them to keep track of anything. [This] means that cryptocurrencies can be everything from utility tokens [and] we could even have a cryptocurrency that represents our presence here at the conference today.

Cryptocurrencies Can Represent Anything Imaginable

Blumer went on to argue that cryptocurrencies can be a security and that you can place these on blockchain networks which are “fundamentally secure rails.” Moreover, cryptos can be anything “imaginable” including representations of real-world commodities, Blumer noted.

Interestingly, Blumer believes that blockchains will “turn [world] governments more into development platforms.…. most of [governments’] enforcement and execution is [almost all] outsourced. We outsource the enforcement of the entire financial system to private organizations like banks but then enforce policies.”

He added:

Once you take something like the US dollar and you put it on the blockchain, you allow the USD to be programmable itself. [This] turns the currency into a development platform that people can integrate with. Right now, when we build products and services, we do so around the constraints of the USD. And, there’s a lot of them. We can only make transfers every so often. The [existing system] is expensive, it’s slow, and so we [have to] build our products around these constraints.

He predicted:

But in the future, when jurisdiction and tax laws are coded in the dollar itself, businesses can build their technology stacks on top of government-like fiat currencies. And, this is going to drastically change enterprise and how enterprise interfaces directly with the government.

EOS Ecosystem Growing Steadily Despite Serious Challenges

After raising a record-breaking $4 billion through an initial coin offering (ICO), Block.one, the initial developer of EOS, helped launch the EOS mainnet during the summer of 2018. Although EOS has experienced challenges with its delegated proof-of-stake (PoS)-based governance model, there are currently over 260 decentralized applications (dApps) being developed on EOS.

Notably, there were recently a couple of security issues related to EOS that reportedly led to the theft of millions of dollars worth of EOS tokens. While analysts noted that these attacks were not directly related to any issues with the EOS blockchain itself, the usage and adoption rate of EOS-based dApps, and dApps built on other smart contracts platforms, remains relatively low – especially when considering the valuations of these blockchain projects.