Sunday, 2nd October, 2016
| Lord of the Zing?
TL;DR: With better security and reliability, smart contracts could replace blockchain as the buzzword of the decade.
(Continued in THE TAKEAWAY below)
TOP 5 STORIES ON COINDESK Bitcoin scaling takes a step forward. French startup Acinq has tested Lightning-style payments on AWS nodes. The test worked. This should alleviate some Lightning skepticism and encourage more trials. Bitcoin scaling, micropayments, etc., are looking more real. Exciting.
Formal verification gets serious attention. While no silver bullet, it does offer a mathematical way to search for bugs and detect errors before smart contract code hits reality. This could have a big impact on confidence in smart contract potential, and broaden possible use cases and trials. I'm formally interested.
Blockchain had a strong presence in Sibos. In the opening plenary, the president of the Swiss National Bank mentioned cryptocurrency within two minutes of taking the stage. He recognized the blockchain would be important in reforming structures, but said "no way" to banks switching over completely any time soon. You don’t say.
UBS has a new take on blockchain + international trade. Rather than focus on just one aspect of trade finance (as do most other proposals in the sector), the bank is developing a user-friendly initiative that will cover the whole process from initial purchase to final delivery. More holistic.
Catastrophe insurance gets the blockchain treatment. Sompo Japan is the latest large insurer to announce that it is looking at how the blockchain can make insurance more efficient and transparent. Big business.
More Blockchain News →
QUOTE OF THE WEEK “Blockchain-enabled deposit taking could prove to be pure defense – protecting the customer base – but like many activities in business, once a chain of data and transactions is established on a blockchain and connected to other blockchains, it could yield innovations as yet unimagined." - IBM Report, Leading the Pack in Blockchain Banking |
THE TAKEAWAY
Could “smart contracts” replace “blockchain” as the buzzword of the decade? It’s a pretty tall order, but Devcon2 got us thinking.
Blockchain tech is everywhere, with banks, insurers, tech giants, and even governments looking into how to adapt the technology. And the pace of investigation shows no signs of abating, with excited announcements and proofs-of-concept coming thick and fast.
But much of the breathless enthusiasm for "blockchain" has actually been less about the distributed ledgers themselves and more about the underlying scripting languages, which could finally facilitate the execution of dynamic "smart contracts".
The concept of smart contracts is not new (they pre-date blockchain tech), but their real-world potential seems closer to fruition today thanks to new blockchain-based protocols like ethereum and hyperledger.
Despite the bad rap smart contracts have earned recently -- from major hacks (The DAO) and legal uncertainty ("smart contracts aren't contracts") -- they are now a fundamental part of the blockchain sector.
The challenge is whether we can trust them to work as advertised and intended.
So how do we get there?
Several of the Devcon2 presentations in Shanghai were about smart contract security. We’re hearing a lot about formal verification these days, which involves a mathematical way to show, without testing, that a smart contract does only what it is supposed to do. In addition, contract analyzers that help debug new smart contracts are a promising new tool for developers, and an area we would expect significant investment in the coming years.
Companies like Digital Asset Holdings, Barclays, and R3 are already working on new smart contract languages and templates, while startups such as Legalese and Zeppelin are exploring how to create reliable code. And we expect many others to compete to solve the problem of smart contract reliability.
As smart contracts move from the realm of the hypothetical into the minefield of reality, the real world will give us a better feel for what’s safe and what’s practical. And the myriad new languages, debugging tools, and legal services will hopefully evolve to the point that disasters like the DAO can be mitigated or avoided outright.
Someday we might even come to trust smart contracts -- at least as something more than a corporate buzzword.
– N
More background:
| | | |
OTHERS ARE TALKING ABOUT...
Banking Technology covered Sibos quite thoroughly, and browsing their articles gives an idea of the protagonism of blockchain ideas. My favourite was “Sibos 2016: blockchain passes stupidity test.” Finextra’s reporting on Ripple’s twitter shenanigans managed to inform and stoke the on/off blockchain flames at the same time. Fun.
An article by Nasdaq assumes that ETC’s decline is to do with a lack of use, and warns that bitcoin could go the same way if we don’t get out and use it. Observer.com ran an interesting article on a new type of decentralized Internet that directly connects your own cloud storage with other cloud storages. Fortune has a glowing and well-written profile on Vitalik.
UPCOMING EVENTS
RECENT SECTOR REPORTS
WHAT WE’VE BEEN UP TO We're continuing to tweak the format of the Weekly - what do you think? We're also working on a new Daily Newsletter template and style. We hope to be able to show you some of that next week. (You do subscribe, don't you?)
Did you like this? *Share it.*
Feedback? Let us know.
Got a tip? Send it in. | | | | | Share this email |     | | |
0 Comments