Blockchain companies continue attracting funds all over the world while French political parties attack the technology in their new report.
The time, when blockchain was associated solely with bitcoin, has already passed. Nowadays more and more banks, bitcoin companies and financial institutions share plans to use the technology behind bitcoin at best value. The fact that blockchain has been in focus of everyone’s attention can be easily explained – it has potential to alter the fintech ecosystem, and change the way we perceive it. Moreover, it’s already transforming it worldwide.
Digital Asset Holdings has recently raised $50 million in funding to develop transformative solutions enhancing the vital services that they provide. Mr. Viswanathan from J.P. Morgan, one of the leading investors, commented: “We are proud to be a lead investor in this round of financing. Distributed Ledger Technology has the potential to transform the way our industry does business, and we believe Digital Asset has the right talent and technology to make it a reality.”
Prominent figures from the bitcoin industry express their support to the financial revolution taking place nowadays. Don Duet, co-head of the Technology Division at Goldman Sachs, focuses on the importance of current technological awareness in the financial industry. Duet states that blockchain “offers a technological solution that enables multiple counterparts to see and enact upon the same understanding of truth on an asset transfer in a way again that is immutable, that’s protected, that uses cryptology to make sure you cannot go back and change something inappropriately… creates a new way to envision the way that we do many parts of the financial industry, particularly again in places where we have multiple parties wanting to have single version of truth.”
Goldman Sachs has already achieved progress in blockchain adoption. It has developed its own cryptocurrency for trading stocks, bonds and other assets (application for a new virtual currency called SETLCoin was published in December 2015).
However, there is an opinion exactly opposite to the support observed among financial institutions. Two of France’s leftist political parties have published a document called “Digital Revolution” where they took a stand against blockchain technology, big data, internet of things and 3D printing.
The report called blockchain open source, distributed and decentralized. According to it, the technology poses a threat to all the ‘trusted third parties’ like banks, notaries, land registers, civil status, and a lot of sovereign functions of the State. “In the context of current social and economic relations, digital revolution, with automation linked to big-data, generalizing robotics and connected objects, the blockchain in banking and financial, will cause massive destruction of jobs which will not be compensated by the creation of a number [of] restricted [and] highly skilled jobs”, it said.
The report is not the first case of confrontation between politics and blockchain. US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) Commissioner Christopher Giancarlo once expressed his position concerning the technology. He underlined that it is impossible to look at the blockchain from one particular angle. On the one hand, it can cause a greatly disruptive impact on the human capital that supports the recordkeeping of contemporary financial markets. But on the other, the blockchain will help reduce some of the enormous cost of the increased financial system infrastructure required by new laws and regulations.
The existence of two controversial points of view just one more time emphasizes the contradictory nature of blockchain. However this fact doesn’t stop the progress and blockchain is deeply studied by experts all over the world.
next