Image by SylviaRitter

Sign up to our newsletter here!

We have a short letter this week noting a couple of important developments in the space.

Enjoy,

Cryptiv.

This Week’s Updates

IOT consortium.

Another consortium has emerged to focus on developing security and identity standards for physical devices while maintaining interoperability among multiple blockchain protocols. There are a number of exciting applications for blockchain technologies and IoT devices as well as for supply chain management and logistics. This consortium seems to be bringing together different groups interested in these applications. Here is a comprehensive list of twenty-five blockchain consortia. It was put together by William Mougayar, which he discusses in this article.

Private chains go live… almost.

Some of the anticipated private blockchain projects are slowly approaching production readiness. IBM’s Fabric is said to have its first implementation ready in March of this year while R3’s Corda still has some ways to go and expects to hit production scale in 2018. Many in the space believe that public networks like Ethereum will play a significant role in enterprise adoption. Joseph Lubin of ConsenSys, for example, stated: “It’s my thesis that every company that is building a blockchain will have a use case for public blockchain.”. It’s likely that enterprise adoption won’t be so binary as interoperability between private and public networks have attracted significant attention. To learn more about interoperability take a look at Vitalik Buterin’s report for R3 on the subject (I’d recommend reading the summary first). In an interview this week, Balaji Srinivasan from 21.co compared the private/public issue to how Internets and Intranets have evolved. At first, corporations preferred Intranets as they allowed greater control and security but eventually the two have molded together. Users often can’t tell which one they are on. Srinivasan argues this might be the direction we are heading where ideas and technologies from both sides may be integrated with each other.

Blockchain, for the people by the people!

An interesting report came out this week from the C.D. Howe Institute. The report examined the potential economic impacts of blockchain technologies. It also recommended that regulators ensure the benefits derived from adopting the technology are shared amongst the wider economy and not just benefit the private sector. Specifically, the authors warned that the technology could be hijacked by the very intermediaries it was intended to disrupt and used to “reshuffle rents at the expense of users”. The authors also suggested a principle-based regulatory approach in order to provide legal clarity to help facilitate innovation and experimentation with the technology. A principle-based approach has been successfully used by the UK’s financial regulatory body, the FSA, when regulating the use of blockchain technologies. Their regulatory ‘sandbox’ facilitates different proof of concepts and financial applications within a live environment using technologies that are not yet regulated. This helps facilitate the development of new technologies despite there being a lack of regulatory clarity while also allowing regulators to study and understand these emerging technologies. A similar approach has been adopted by Ontario’s Securities Commission through their Launchpad program.

Sign up to our newsletter here!