EVENTS
IBS Journal March 2018
17
Can’t stop the block – or can you?
The first major event of the year, and it had to be blockchain. Alex Hamilton slipped into London Blockchain Week to chart a talk on that ever-present bugbear: regulation
Senior Fintech Reporter Alex Hamilton
I
t had to be blockchain didn’t it? If you thought we could escape a few weeks into the year without mention of it, think again. A few hundred blockchain fanatics descended on London at the end of January to discuss all the goings on with the industry, and the major talking points hinged on regulation.
In a panel exploring how the enterprise side can adapt to this new tech, Julian Cunningham-Day, co-founder and head of fintech at Linklaters, asked where the big challenges were coming from.
“Data is the new oil,” said Marcus de Wilde, enterprise lead at Applied Blockchain. “Businesses are looking at creating consortia to generate new revenue through existing business lines. What they don’t want to do is throw the baby out with the bath water.
“A lot of companies are experimenting with tokenisation for internal purposes. There are some corporates that are venturing into the public token space. The most famous is Kodak, which has been a lesson in ‘bulls**t’, among other things.”
Richard Cook, head of emerging technology at Royal Bank of Scotland, took a more narrative approach. “2016 was about technical challenges, solving issues and challenging in the public space,” he said. “Decentralisation of the business model is far more important in 2018 because it’s about politics, people and policy.RBS set out to build a finance-grade ledger [using R3’s Corda]. On top of that, one of the major problems we have is that as you get closer to go-live, trying to not replace one centralised business model with another one.”
Ajit Tripathi, a partner for EMEA at Consensys Enterprise, added that decentralised models are “a force of nature. It’s clear to a lot of people, including Mark Zuckerberg, that centralised systems have their limitation and that there may be a greater demand from consumers in having greater control of their assets and their data.”
The conversation switched then to regulation, a thorn in the side of many crypto and blockchain evangelists. Cook took the lead,
Ajit Tripathi: decentralised models are “a force of nature”
attacking the subject as you would expect a man from the banking industry would.
“We have regulation for a reason, and that’s important to recognise. It’s there because someone did something in the past that we don’t want to happen again,” he said. “In crypto, a third [of the industry] doesn’t want to be regulated, there’s a third that doesn’t know and there’s a third saying ‘please do it, make this noise go away’.”
Cook added that he can guarantee that the regulators would clamp down on all three indiscriminately. “[RBS] has always pushed for “better regulation later [rather than] poor regulation early… We have enough regulation – people just need to apply it.”
De Wilde finished things off by stating that he felt like a “cynical millennial” about the idealistic opinions spoken thus far on the panel: “The impression I get is that these experiments are failing. These consortia, formed in 2013 in a panic, are breaking apart. There will be small islands of decentralisation and we will depend on companies linking up their systems. We need to think about how we’re going to support and sustain the networks we do create.”
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