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BLOCKCHAIN JAMNAURACRHY 22001188
before you even press send how much it’s going to cost to get there.
It all boils down to this notion of digital assets. ... [What] it all comes down to is the way to settle value with nality in real time is for one party to exchange a digital asset with another party.
Today, initially, the only form of negotiable digital assets are cryptocurrencies which has banks a little scared. But as we start talking through what we’ve learned in the enterprise blockchain space, we realized that we can tokenize all sorts of other asset classes, commodities, securities, and even at currencies, where central banks or commercial banks can issue a token that represents a claim on deposits held at some nancial institution.
[So tokenization] is a huge deal. I mean it’s everything. I think it’s the tipping point for blockchain. The irony is it goes back to Bitcoin kind of started this all.
You know we said, “Well we like the idea of the technology underneath bitcoin, but we want to focus on blockchain.” I mean forget for a second blockchain is actually terminology that’s invented by the bitcoin primer that was published nine years ago by Satoshi—it’s their terminology. It’s kind of coming back full circle where you’re seeing the convergence of all of these cool optimization capabilities, you know, immutability and work ow optimization, supply chain management.
...[W]e [at IBM] bring 107 years of credibility in developing and operating mission critical, transactional, and nancial systems, and I could do just an ad for a second, that’s what the IBM blockchain platform is all about and as the industry evolves, as our platform offering evolves, what we want to be able to bring to small business, medium sized businesses, large businesses is the ability to develop solutions using our toolkit.
I always go back to digital assets. We in the U.S. and around the world, when we start talking about nancial instruments, we classify assets differently. But when it comes to an ecosystem and a community that becomes inherently peer to peer and inherently democratic, it’s about an asset class agnostic distributed exchange, where I can sell you my security token in exchange for your at token, or I can sell you my commodity token or utility token for the same.
I think the ecosystem gets built automatically by way of new assets coming to a common network or interoperable set of networks, and that’s what’s missing today...
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