BLOCKCHAIN ISSUE
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FRANCE BLOCKTECH
What do we think about the future of Blockchain? It actually really depends on the area you wish to focus on but in order to get a good view on how the future could be, it is important to get to know the past and understand the present.
It’s been already 10 years since Satoshi Nakamoto released it’s 9 pages
white paper and already a huge amount of work has been done so far by
the entire blockchain community. Other blockchains were born and other
masterminds have upset the course of things such as Vitalik Buterin, co-
creator of the well-known Ethereum blockchain.
The Ethereum blockchain will be the base of most of the big innovations within the blockchain industry thanks to smart contracts (pieces of computer code behaving like a contract with conditions).
With this new innovation, we moved from the purely financial transaction use case with Bitcoin to a whole new set of applications for industries such as for the supply chain, insurances, financial custody, voting, etc.
One of the biggest application that appeared on the blockchain has been ICOs because it allows entrepreneurs to launch their project and seek forinvestments from the community. This drove a huge adoption of the blockchain technology because of its entrepreneurship simplifier but also, speculation.
Today, we see a maturation of the entire blockchain industry. ICOs aren’t
the easy go-to anymore and the overall market valuation has considerably
decreased. The euphoria is gone and the realism has come. Now, everybody is focusing on delivering instead of promising. Results over
dreams should have been the key leitmotiv since the beginning.
For a little while, Blockchain has been the rulers, bankers, politicians -free
ecosystem. But rapidly, this type of individuals understood the true technical, societal and economic potential that Blockchain could bring to
the entire society. It is natural that we saw an adoption and interest from
them around the year 2015.
On the regulatory side, it is most recently that things started to move with
regulators releasing their new laws and guidelines. It is a really important
component because such as with any new technology, abuses can be done
quite easily. Blockchain wasn’t the exception and has suffered from its past usage within the dark web.
In France, for example, the AMF (French financial regulator) just voted a
law that would allow entrepreneurs to pass through a kind of validation
process and, therefore, be validated or not by the AMF. This label would
be optional, which gives the entrepreneurs the flexibility when conducting
an ICO.
Instead of waiting until all these laws are clear and applied, some actors
within the industry such as Chaineum have decided to place themselves
into a self-regulation state in order to implement clear, transparent and fair
practices for the entire ICO market; cf icocharter. Something as simple and
logical as KYC/AML (Know Your Customer/ Anti-Money Laundering)
practices during ICOs was considered like the evils practice by the
Blockchain purists. Now KYC/AML is everywhere and a lot of solution
providers have emerged in this field. If you add to that some strong
custodians solutions such as multi-signature wallets, you can ensure a
certain safety of operation.
You can consider Blockchain industry as an updated digital industry
because a lot of jobs of the traditional web industry is now pushed towards
the professionalization of the industry.
We often hear about new Proof Of Concept ran by different big corporations or institutions, new partnerships, etc. In that sense,
Blockchain has a bright future. Despite the lack of investments within the
ICO ecosystem, a lot is being made which promises a lot of great things.
Another point that drives adoption is education. More and more people are
approaching this technology with a lot of curiosity, to understand what all
of this is about or simply to be part of it. In the conferences and meetups,
we see all type of people: students, professionals, retired people. It’s a
proof of interest from the entire society, without any distinction of gender/
ethnicity and it can only lead to great things. Most of the serious
universities start to offer some Blockchain related programs to their
students and the students that are currently finishing theirs usually do their
final dissertation on the Blockchain topic.
Will all of this evolve and go even further? Of course, it will. As of today,
there are already some researches being made so that we can implement
some Artificial Intelligence and some Quantum Computing in Blockchain.
To conclude, you can compare Blockchain to the train; When just created,
steam trains were laborious, polluting and only reserved to a specific
community but with the hard work and long time (a bit more than 200
years), we eventually got to the levitating trains and more recently
Hyperloop. Blockchain as of today is still the equivalent of the steam train, polluting and laborious but has an incredible potential.
Thomas Réveillon, Partner at Chaineum
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