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Fintech Startups are Overtaking Banks, Will Crypto Emerge as the Winner in Long-Term?

Fintech startups are overtaking banks, will crypto emerge as the winner in long-term?

Fintech Startups are Overtaking Banks, Will Crypto Emerge as the Winner in Long-Term?

Fintech startups are overtaking banks, will crypto emerge as the winner in long-term?

The business case for corporate investment in bitcoin’s underlying technology, the blockchain, is inevitable, according to a report.

Titled ‘Key Drivers, Emerging Trends, and Development in Corporate Banking,’ the study discussed how new competitors in the financial technology sector are overtaking corporate banks. It posed two key trends, Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain, the combination of which could serve corporates speedy financial services, including optimized utilization of supply chain, know your customer, identity management, and trading.

“The latest thinking in this area seeks to combine emerging technologies of AI and blockchain into a single proposition – the enormous, untapped source of data within blockchains being interrogated to unearth/create value, by AI,” the report read. “Big data providing the ‘quantity’ and blockchain – with its data capture, validation and assurance capabilities – the ‘quality’.”

Clients are the New Competition

Authors Finextra Research and Oracle Financial Services wrote that deployment of AI would see the launch of “cash management solutions” and the attainment of “governance and regulatory needs.” Such an infrastructural overhaul would require corporates to manage a massive amount of computational data while maintaining its integrity. Blockchain will be able to address such a challenge.

The authors added that it was likely for corporates to invest in a blockchain solution than seeking support from their banks. The statement followed a World Economic Forum research which predicted that blockchain platforms would store 10 percent of the world’s GDP in the next decade. The report added that central banks’ and monetary policies’ sluggishness was a roadblock before blockchain’s growth. But that was not deterring corporates from testing blockchain in their private sandbox environments.

That said, a bank had more hurdles than a corporate chain when it came to utilizing the digital ledger technology. That bought one more time against the other. For instance, tech companies such as IBM and Alibaba had filed more blockchain patents than Bank of America and MasterCard. Nevertheless, the BoA held the most at 82.

“Blockchain can facilitate the transfer of value (currency) of anything digital and could be deployed within a cash-pool to manage cash positions and liquidity requirements without the use of traditional bank infrastructure,” wrote Fintextra. “The corporate would have to invest in a blockchain solution and be able to manage it within their infrastructure, or banks might offer it as a dedicated service.”

Blockchain Not Ready, Anyway

The Finextra-Oracle report admitted that the business case for corporate investment in the blockchain would take more time. It could be due to the technology’s inherent issues, mostly related to its scalability in a distributed environment. Also, there are concerns raised about the blockchain’s potential use case over an already available database management technology.

“Banks are now working on various use cases leveraging the integrity of data that blockchain provides, thus creating a single ‘golden source’ that can be viewed by multiple parties. This is a key advantage,” reasoned Finextra.

Published at Wed, 24 Apr 2019 15:47:11 +0000

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The Ethereum Killer Is Ethereum 2.0: Vitalik Buterin’s Roadmap

VitalikTalk.jpg

Speaking on November 25 at BeyondBlock Taipei 2017, Ethereum inventor and co-founder Vitalik Buterin outlined his vision for Ethereum 2.0. He described major changes in Ethereum’s architecture that are likely to be implemented over the next few years to improve Ethereum in terms of privacy, safety (consensus safety and smart contract safety) and, of course, scalability, which was the main focus of Buterin’s talk.

Buterin doesn’t seem worried about competitors. “The Ethereum killer is Ethereum, the Ethereum of China is Ethereum, the Ethereum of Taiwan is Ethereum… 2.0,” he said.

The fact that Ethereum is booming seems to confirm Buterin’s optimism. ETH’s price has been relentlessly climbing, recently reaching almost $500, and Ethereum is handling more transactions than all other major blockchains combined.

Decentralization, scalability and security are among the important properties that blockchain systems should have, but there are conflicts. Off-chain solutions are useful, but limited. According to Buterin, it’s very easy to have two of these properties but very hard to have all three. However, Ethereum’s ambitious goal should be that of achieving all three at the same time. “We want to scale to thousands of transactions per second, on chain, without any supernodes,” reads one of Buterin’s slides.

Sharding

Sharding — dividing a blockchain network into several smaller component networks (called shards) capable of processing transactions in parallel — is considered to be a promising way to achieve high throughputs comparable to the thousands of transactions per second of traditional payment networks such as Visa and MasterCard.

“You can think of [sharding] as, in a fairly simple version, creating a blockchain where you have, let’s say, a hundred different universes, and each of these universes is a different account space,” said Buterin. “So you can have an account in some universe or you can have a contract in some universe and you can send a transaction in some universe, and if you send a transaction in some universe it only affects stuff in some universe.

“But these kind of 100 universes are not just separate blockchains; they are systems that are also interconnected with each other,” continued Buterin. “Particularly, they share consensus. So in order to break even one of them, you have to break the whole thing.”

Buterin went on to describe relatively easy and more sophisticated ways to implement sharding in the Ethereum blockchain, outlining a sharding roadmap that foresees, at least initially, the creation of new “universes” that don’t impact the main chain while permitting iterative experimentation, such as introducing higher levels of scalability, starting with “quadratic scalability as nodes validate certain shards and act as light clients for other shards.”

Privacy

Buterin noted that zero-knowledge proof (zk-Snarks) privacy technology equivalent to Zcash has been implemented in the recent “Byzantium” Ethereum upgrade, offering application developers new ways to implement tighter privacy. These new privacy tools will permit showing transactions to specific parties while hiding them from public view. Buterin went as far as saying that the privacy problem is now three quarters of the way to being solved.

Proof of Work vs. Proof of Stake

A major upgrade to Ethereum will be the introduction of Proof of Stake (PoS) in Casper which, according to Buterin, might be ready by next summer. With the first release of Casper, Ethereum will transition from pure Proof of Work (PoW) to hybrid PoW/PoS. “In this scheme, all of the proof-of-work mechanics will continue to exist, but additional proof-of-stake mechanics will be added,” noted Buterin.

The main reason why PoS is seen as a necessary development is, of course, the need to reduce the energy requirements of PoW blockchains like the current versions of Ethereum and bitcoin. A recent report claims that bitcoin mining consumes as much power in a year as 159 countries, which is clearly far too much, and Buterin admitted that today’s Ethereum isn’t any better than bitcoin in that respect.

Smart Contract Security

Smart contracts implemented with Turing-complete programming languages are arguably the main innovation introduced by Ethereum. While smart contracts are finding countless applications and moving lots of money, the security and safety of Ethereum smart contracts have been questioned. Buterin confirmed that Ethereum will eventually introduce formal verification for smart contracts and that a new Python-like smart-contract programming language — dubbed “Viper” — is being implemented to enable the development of safer Ethereum applications.

While Buterin hasn’t said anything that he has not said in previous talks and papers, his BeyondBlock talk served as a useful confirmation and summary of the ambitious Ethereum development roadmap.

Besides Buterin’s talk, all the talks given at BeyondBlock Taipei 2017 are included in the full video recordings of the morning session and the afternoon session.

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