a better question is to look at how people use it, the frictions they encounter, and who works on solving those frictions
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible
Given that we are now entering another crypto hype cycle and blockchain technology, discussions often veer towards crypto and the allure of embedded tokens. I’m going to stick to the realty and opportunity: utilizing blockchain in fixed income finance.
Having spent two decades navigating the complexities of Wall Street, I know the critical problem plaguing the fixed income market: the overwhelming amount of data generated during the origination of debt instruments and the subsequent challenges in reconciliation during clearing and settlement. Night cycles, calling Bloomberg to fix security master. Calling DTCC to settle trades. Blockchain is the best technology to solve this. Only if applied correctly. Otherwise, it’s a waste.
We started with a fundamental goal: to debunk the myths and misconceptions surrounding blockchain in the securities space. Despite the pervasive FUD propagated by the media, we have now proved to regulators that securities originated on blockchain are indeed securities – not merely speculative digital assets.
At its core, we are looking to address the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network, we have proved by recording of municipal loans and securities on our blockchain. While it may not be the flashy product that garners headlines, this milestone marks a significant step forward. We also trained all of FINRA’s fixed income examiners….
Our next step is to bring brokered CDs, directly to the investors, giving them access to negotiate with the issuers. From there the goal is to extend to real-time clearing and settlement, streamlining processes and enhancing efficiency across the fixed income ecosystem.
Aware - and kudos to them for using Ethereum - It's a word play to confuse the market. Notice they don't say on Public Net. The installation is permissioned. I was involved with the first Yankee CD trade in 2018 with JPM. No investor can buy this without the KYC/AML checks, means if there's a wallet it's just a brokerage account - the underlying security is at a custodian not on-chain and the TA is still involved in registering the ownership of the share.
Great, yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Capital formation has been occurring this way for at least 12 years on public blockchains.
Satoshidice was one of the first companies and its shareholders created a vibrant secondary market onchain. They did dividends daily and it always went out to every shareholder daily. What happens now is so much more advanced but even more frictionless for crypto native issuers and traders.
One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
>yeah are you going to move off the permissions blockchain to just permissioned smart contracts on a public blockchain?
Perhaps for clearing - ownership wise I think it stays permissioned - no investor wants to loose the wallet and not be able to recover their asset.
>One day DTCC and FINRA and the Fed will conform it to their redundant processes so that registered securities can do the same, using the same public utilities as everyone else.
100% - that's the plan but it's a massive regulatory capture to fight. Akin to launching a rocket and you need DoD and hundred other permissions.
One thing to keep in mind - Sec Act of 1933 and 1934 are here to stay - they may get new regs under them but ownership needs to be transferable outside just the normal case of trading i.e. trust, death, divorce, birth blah blah...
smart contracts on public blockchains can handle all those custodial aspects
the smart contracts can be permissioned and have multiple signers and beneficiaries and payable on death conditions, the oracles and admins can be multi signer accounts too
I’m just trying to figure out what false dilemmas you are operating under, the examples already exist
You’re the advocate, in your world, but seemingly stuck in their myriad of concerns that are based on incomplete information
reminds me of how the substitute meat is repulsive to omnivores and vegans alike. hyperledger vibes
the challenge with hyperledger is that there you can run unlimited arbitrary executions of any computational time, but have to run all other nodes’ arbitrary executions of any computational time, so the whole network is DDOSing each other with these stupidly expensive computations all for the sake of saying “blockchain without crypto!”
as if the crypto didn't serve the specific purpose of putting a cost on computational transactions, creating limited block space, so that people wouldn't do expensive computations
it doesn’t solve any problem that blockchain set out to solve, its nice that you found a way to have a shared google spreadsheet with macros without having to debate over whose account made the doc or organization, but its not a technological improvement that presents a novel alternative to a fungible data writing credit that crypto is, the only improvement is catering to a gullible enterprise audience who simply asked for a no-coin version of blockchain so they could say they have a blockchain strategy, grifting to enterprise clients is fine until those users act like they solved a deficiency of speculation as if thats a problem at all
public blockchains and smart contracts have a solution for the problems you mentioned so far, those are the myriad of concerns I’m referring to. Public blockchains also provide benefits to transparency and security that make the SROs and securities regulator redundant in their current form. There is another more productive way they can improve the things deployed on blockchains and give confidence to investors, but that’s only going to come from the blockchain space’s own regulatory capture, ironically thanks to speculation creating new consolidation of power and interest.
> the root cause of friction in fixed income trading: the lack of direct origination and data quality across market participants. By leveraging a permissioned network,
Blockchain has nothing to do with "data quality across market participants". Bad data entered into blockchain remains bad data.
Basically, you're lacking a platform that brings all those things together.
What blockchains may give you is a slow append-only log, which is a very minor part of that platform. And making everyone move to that platform is a much bigger challenge :)
>just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space
This is such a great comparison! Crypto and "financial services" are both a massive waste of labor that produces zero material wealth and mainly exist to facilitate money laundering and further upward siphoning of wealth.
This is why Janet Yellen is currently throwing a tantrum that those big meanies in China aren't playing fair by using their labor to actually manufacture things instead of shuffle fake money back and forth between different buckets until more money appears out of thin air: https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/yellen-intends-warn-...
just saying “speculation” as if thats not a use case misses that “financial services” are our biggest industry on the planet and thats mirrored in the blockchain space, many people solve frictions and compete with each other. it willfully ignores that all currencies are 99% held as stores of value and the M0 money supply is a tiny fraction used as cash and for merchant transactions, a distribution also mirrored in the blockchain space but ignorantly used to discredit it despite ironically showing how well it works as a parallel economy.
additionally due to the structure of blockchains as a pay to write database, most use cases that aren't related to stores of value or trading are intrinsically tied to something financial which makes the standard impossible