Excitement around the potential applications of blockchain has kept the innovative technological construct in the forefront of many in the financial sector, as outlined in the article.
While blockchain may be on its way to pop-culture status, it’s certainly not there yet. Panelists recognized education’s steep slope. According to Joyce Shen, Director of Emerging Technologies and Partnerships at Thomson Reuters “there needs to be a lot of education across the whole industry” while Yorke Rhodes, Global Business Strategist of Microsoft recognized the “shortage of engineers particularly those skilled in blockchain.” Some such as Matt Liston, Head of Strategy and Communications at Gnosis opined that education is “about detaching from the tech stack as much as possible.”
Mercator Advisory Group recognizes the opportunity offered by an immutable record of transactions afforded by blockchain technology, but determining when and where this type of resource intensive record keeping is truly necessary remain open questions. We’ve maintained an examination of blockchain and Bitcoin with several research pieces, most recently in Understanding Risk in Bitcoin and Bitcoin Exchanges.
Overview by Joseph Walent, Senior Analyst, Emerging Technologies Advisory Service at Mercator Advisory Group
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