Todd McDonald is the co-founder & Chief Strategy Officer at R3. In this podcast we discuss R3’s Product Vision and their views on market trends, market needs and R3’s long term product investment.
What is blockchain?
Blockchain is a way for multiple participants to join a network and update the state of that network without having to trust someone to coordinate amongst them. For businesses, Todd sees blockchain as a way to connect with more customers and more businesses without having to worry as much around the trust factor.
Three market trends
Back in September of this year Todd presented at CordaCon a presentation entitled “R3 Product Vision: Market Trends, Market Needs and R3’s Long-Term Product Investment.”In it he started by analysing three market trends:
* “Everything is an asset”,
* “push-pull of (de)centralisation”
* “Plan ahead for regulation”.
Everything is an asset
Blockchain has the ability to create digital scarcity. Essentially anything that you can prove ownership of can become an asset. Assets can be digitally mobile such as NFTs and/or they can be used as collateral for a loan.
A digital asset of course can be the digital manifestation or representation of a real physical asset but equally it could also by a pure digital asset. Pure digital assets, such as the purchase of digital property in the Metaverse, have recently seen a bit of an explosive growth. Republic Realm purchased a $4.3 million 24x24 digital piece of land, whilst Metaverse Group in November made a $2.43 million purchase of parcels in Decentraland.
Push-Pull of (de)centralisation
Blockchains are custody and software. They’re the ability to custody digital assets in the software layer without having the need of human beings. Todd shared with us that some of the biggest investors in this space so far have been existing intermediaries. Financial market infrastructure is heavily investing in distributed systems and blockchain.
He then explains what he sees as the different facets of the decentralisation journey:
* You need critical mass and become successful. There needs to be a journey to attract people to a network and distribute the roles of that network. Potentially over time the network can become more distributed to decentralised. What is interesting about the crypto side is that with tokenomics all participants can be incentivised from day one onto a decentralised network
* Progressive decentralisation a term coined by Jesse Walden, from Andreesen Horowitz, talks about starting out within a bootstrap minimum viable ecosystem, ie. quite centralised, which as it grows can progress into a decentralised one
Plan ahead for regulation
Once regulation starts it pretty much only increases. This comment isn’t specifically related to crypto regulation but more on financial services. There is an increasing amount of regulatory imperatives such as open banking, GDPR, and Central Securities Depository Regulation (CSDR).
Modernising market infrastructure
SIX digital exchange became live on the 18th of November 2021, when SIX, launched a CHF 150 million ($162 million) tokenised digital bond ...