Category: Corda

Tokens – Lowering the Barriers to Innovation

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 1 Comment

I was getting my daily hit of Matt Levine’s excellent Money Stuff this morning (subscribe here!). In my favourite blockchain blockchain blockchain section he noted:

But a popular pattern in the crypto/token/blockchain world is that someone will come along and be like “finally, through tokenization, we have invented a way to slice _________ into bits and let people trade the bits.” I always find this a bit confusing. Whatever _________ is, it is safe to say that before the invention of tokenization there was already a way to slice it into bits and let people trade the bits. Slicing things into tradeable bits has been a very hot area of finance for a very long time, and people got pretty good at it. Real estate is a popular target for tokenization, for instance, and I am confused because real estate securitization—not so much mortgage-backed securities but real estate investment trusts—is a thing that has existed for a long time.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-01-30/if-you-want-to-invest-in-pot-buy-pot

I agree with this! We’ve had securitisation before blockchains and tokens. You can chop up the title to a painting and sell it to investors in 1% slices already without blockchains or tokens.

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Colin G Platt On Peer-to-Peer

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

Last week I went out with for a beer and pizza with Colin G Platt of Blockchain Insider fame after we did a podcast interview about my book The Basics of Bitcoins and Blockchains at the 11FS office in Devonshire Square in London. Quite appropriately we settled down at the The Bell, a pub in east London and sometime home of the Ethereum London meetups, and talked about how peer-to-peer cryptocurrency payments are.

Here’s a summary of our conversation. Obviously it is heavily edited and we’re not as witty or eloquent as this in real life (well I’m not anyway).

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Bitcoin’s payments are not peer-to-peer!

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 4 Comments

This post is adapted from an article first published on R3’s Medium.

In this post I articulate what a peer-to-peer transaction is, why Bitcoin transactions are not peer-to-peer, and why it is important to understand the differences clearly. I describe the benefits of peer-to-peer transactions and discuss that Corda is the closest architecture to take advantage of those benefits.

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What is Blockchain?

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 3 Comments

Yesterday I did an recording where the interviewer asked me a simple question – what is blockchain? This got me thinking – I had no go-to answer for this. People use this word to cover a wide range of networks and platforms, and some platforms such as R3’s Corda (Note: I work at R3) are categorised as “blockchain” platforms, when they don’t even bundle transactions into blocks!

The best description I could come up with was:

Blockchain is a word used to describe a bundle of technologies that allow digital assets to be created and passed from party to party with guarantees that the assets are authentic and haven’t been copied or counterfeited all without needing to trust a third party to open and maintain accounts for customers.

To break this down a bit:

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Banking When the Bank is Shut – Token Maximalism

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 2 Comments

In this post I describe why freeing financial assets from the books of custodians and returning control of them to their owners as tokens could create significant benefits to an economy. This brings together concepts from traditional finance, cryptocurrencies, and enterprise blockchains.

Opening+hours+of+banks
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Can Blockchains Reduce the Impact of Data Breaches?

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

Another day, another catastrophic data breach.  This time it’s medical records in Singapore, where I live.  At this stage we’re almost immune to this kind of headline:

Cyberattack on Singapore health database steals details of 1.5 million, including Prime Minister (Reuters)

But this is quite bad.  Eileen Yu noted in her piece for ZDNet (my emphasis):

Singapore has suffered its “most serious” data breach, compromising personal data of 1.5 million healthcare patients including that of its Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong.

The affected users are patients of SingHealth, which is the country’s largest group of healthcare institutions comprising 42 clinical specialties, four public hospitals, five speciality centres, nine polyclinics, as well as three community hospitals.

Non-medical personal details of 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth’s specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics between May 1, 2015, and July 4, 2018, had been accessed and copied. The stolen data included patients’ name, national identification number, address, gender, race, and date of birth.

In addition, outpatient medical data of some 160,000 patients were compromised, though, the records were not modified or deleted, said the Ministry of Health and Ministry of Communications and Information (MCI), in a joint statement late-Friday.

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Please Believe My Database

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 2 Comments

I was reading Matt Levine’s Money stuff today and was struck by a thought. He writes:

“A national customs agency, for instance, might be happier approving shipments on an auditable open blockchain than in the proprietary database of a particular shipping company.”

This is interesting, but I want to take it one step further.  Blockchain or not, a record of events that have been cryptographically digitally signed, with references to previous transactions could be very useful.

If you are a company, and a regulator or agency asks you for your view on what happened, and you give the regulator an Excel spreadsheet or a normal database extract saying “Here’s what happened, I promise”, this is very weak evidence and can be tampered easily by deleting rows, or removing key words like the names of sanctioned countries, etc.

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MAS just released Corda for Central Banks… so what?

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

I’m absolutely thrilled to be able to write about the open sourcing of Project Ubin Phase II, a key project that our team has been working on for the past seven months with the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), ten banks, and our partner Accenture.

UbinPhase2
Ubin Phase 2 report

What is Project Ubin?  It’s probably the most advanced starter kit out there for anyone wanting to explore blockchains for banking:

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Blockchains and Central Banks – What Have We Learnt?

~ antonylewis2015 ~ Leave a comment

This article was first posted on r3.com

Over the past couple of years, R3 has worked closely with a number of central banks to explore if distributed ledgers could support their policy goals, and I have had the privilege to participate in a number of these projects.

What have we learnt?  What is important?  What do central banks care about?  While I can’t speak directly for individual organisations, I have collated my own thoughts, and wanted to share these ahead of the Singapore FinTech Festival this year (13-17 Nov) when the results of Singapore’s “Project Ubin” experiments will be announced.

Update (post FinTech Festival): Read about the Open Sourcing of “Corda for Central Banks“!

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The hype around central banks, digital currencies, and blockchains

~ antonylewis2015 ~ 1 Comment
Central banks and blockchain

There has been a lot of hype around central banks, interbank payments, blockchains, and central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), but the narrative has become confusing and often misses the point.  What’s going on?  Actually two independent things are being actively explored:

  1. Decentralisation of interbank payment systems
  2. Wider access to digital central bank money (Central Bank Digital Currencies – CBDCs)

I aim to explain them both in this post.

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