Crypto

Innovate Finance has been working with the Department of International Trade (DIT) on a report on blockchain and the future of financial services. The report was developed with the help of the Economist Intelligence Unit and is now available here. The Executive Summary is as follows: From Concept to Reality: How Blockchain will Reshape the Financial…

The world feels fairly surreal sometimes. I watch the relentless rise in price of bitcoin, ether, litecoin and brethren, and feel it’s just a truly weird moment we’re living in. I’ve never seen assets rising 1000% of, in ether’s case, 5000% in a year. It’s crazy. Alongside this, I see exchanges being hacked on a…

I spent a day facilitating a series of roundtable discussions focused upon distributed ledger technologies (DLT). I realised that there’s a lot of confusion around the subject. Hell, even I’m confused most of the time even after dedicating hours to the subject. When is a distributed ledger needed? What’s the difference between a distributed and…

I still talk a lot about blockchain, distributed ledgers, cryptocurrencies and more, but often feel it’s falling on deaf ears. The price of bitcoin flies around in the $7,000 a coin bracket, having risen from a tenth of that amount a year ago; and many people talk about blockchain and distributed ledger interchangeably, as did…

I was thinking about this question of how to regulate global technology platforms that don’t recognise national boundaries, mainly in the context of crypto and digital currencies. How can you regulate a global currency that has no view of state or national laws? Obviously, you can only regulate it when someone puts national currency in…

Wrapping up thoughts on #Money2020, the Vegas show is by far the biggest of this monster event organising company. I’m guessing there were around 15,000 folks there this year, and everything but everything was being covered: AI, machine learning, mobile wallets, core banking, distributed ledger, blockchain, cryptocurrencies and just about every other aspect of making…

I’m running around the different areas of #Money2020, meeting folks, seeing exhibit demos, hearing track streams and listening to plenary keynotes. To be honest, the keynotes here are just product pitches so I spend most of my time in the track streams, where real dialogue occurs. The major stream that I joined, as mentioned yesterday,…

Another great #Money2020 day, and this one spent mainly in the blockchain stream. Adam Lutwin, CEO of Chain who I referred to recently, kicked off the day with a beginners guide to the crypto world. It was real good. That was followed by a panel moderated by Marc Hochstein, former editor of the American Banker…

Today, I received a guest post from David Demar, cryptocurrency disciple, author and a writer for NoStop.net. I really liked what he sent through and thought it worth a share as it complements quite a bit of what I’ve covered in the last week.  Enjoy! Preparing for the Coming Crypto Revolution Much has been made of…

Continuing yesterday’s discussions about a big bank’s conference, I was intrigued at how often the subject of cryptocurrencies and bitcoin came up. But there again, it’s a topical thing at the moment with the price of bitcoins surging past the $4,000 mark and Goldman Sachs going against JP Morgan, and saying that they might even trade in…