@C4BI
The new ‘DLT-1’ consortium (our tenth) from the Centre
for Business Innovation (CfBI) and it will focus
on corporate applications of Distributed Ledger Technologies.
Whilst
Blockchain technology is still in its infancy and use-cases are continuing
to be developed. There is a consensus around four strong
potential areas, where many consortium members are focussing and experimenting:
●
Provenance, Auditing and Compliance: learning from the emerging examples of
creating trust in the supply chain and wider systems
●
Smart (auto-executing) contracts and dealing with disputes: often in the
financial arena, dealing with counterparty risk e.g. factoring.
Investigating how to be mindful of the legal framework and dispute
resolution issues this creates.
●
Decentralised Markets: ecosystems of buyers and sellers with little/no
intermediary (the ‘Amazon/Ebay/Uber’ killer).
Are there opportunities for new markets or are you next on the ‘hit list’?
●
Payments, and potentially in the future micro-payments, Not only bitcoin but
potentially the enabler of the entire DLT economy
Members
will also want to stay abreast of ongoing arguments about the final take-up
of solutions, and deal with the lack of basic
understanding of the differences to existing database and infrastructure
systems within their organisations. In addition, it is
important to map the many hurdles that need to be overcome to unlock the
power that these technologies might bring as they mature and are applied
over the next 10 years.
Thrashing out the needs of various users and the common ground, required to
allow these
systems to work without compromising the security or fungibility of the
network across private and public chains, is an area which needs exploration
now. In particular, conversations in this area are needed before you will be
able to fully assess the risk profiles of projects in both:
●
Absolute terms: what is the worst that can happen
●
Relative terms: How does this risk profile differ from non-DLT solutions.
I’m interested! What do I
do now?
