Blockchain Revolution

Banks and Financial Services
Perhaps in no other industry have we seen a swifter change of opinion. For the longest
time, most financial institutions dismissed bitcoin as the speculative tool of gamblers
and criminals, and barely even registered blockchain on their radars. Today they are
quite literally “all in.” Watching this unfold in real time in 2015 was truly incredible.
Before 2015, few major financial institutions had announced investments in the

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sector. Today Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Bank of Montreal, Société Générale,
State Street, CIBC, RBC, TD Bank, Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, BNY Mellon,
Wells Fargo, Mizuho Bank, Nordea, ING, UniCredit, Commerzbank, Macquarie, and
dozens of others are investing in the technology and wading into the leadership
discussion. Most of the world’s biggest banks have signed up to the R3 consortium
and many more have partnered with the Linux Foundation to launch the Hyperledger
Project. Banks should be included in the discussion about leadership, but other
stakeholders must remain cautious of powerful incumbents looking to control this
technology, just as they had to tread cautiously in the early days of the Internet.
Developers
Developers in the community are split on basic technical issues, and the community is
expressing a need for coordination and leadership. Gavin Andresen, the bitcoin core
developer at the center of the block-size debate, told us, “I’d prefer to stay in the
engine room, keeping the bitcoin engine going”
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rather than spending every waking
moment advocating his position. However, given the lack of clear leadership,
Andresen has been inadvertently cast in the spotlight. In the summer of 2015, he told
us, “My job over the next six months is to focus on bitcoin’s technical life, making
sure bitcoin is still around in two or three years for those businesses to happen:
micropayments, stock trading, or property transfer, all these other things,” which
involves a lot of advocating and lobbying. To him, the Internet governance network is
a useful starting point. “I always look for role models. The figure role model is the
IETF.”
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How the Internet is governed is “kind of chaotic and messy,” he said, but it
works and it’s reliable.