Blockchain Summit Frankfurt, taking place on the 26th April at Kap Europa, will see over 700 blockchain focused attendees joining over 60 visionary speakers.
One of the Blockchain Summit speakers, Hans Lombardo, is CMO of Gold Sponsor Blockpass. Hans is a successful entrepreneur and enthusiastic evangelist of blockchain technologies, who speaks at blockchain and fintech events globally. Additionally, he co-founded Chain of Things – a Hong Kong-based startup integrating blockchain & IoT devices.
Hans will be discussing the Decentralised Protocol for Self-Sovereign Identities with Embedded Compliance on the 26th April and also took some time to answer our speaker Q&A:
1. How are you using or planning to use Blockchain in your organisation?
Blockpass is using the blockchain and smart contracts technology to provide an effective self-sovereign identity application, designed to give seamless and immediate access to regulated services which require know-your-customer (KYC) and anti-money-laundering (AML) checking. Self-sovereign means that the user has control over their identity and identity data, and where it sent and how it is used.
Blockpass also helps to deal with two seemingly contradictory regulations – Data Protection (GDPR) and AML. Blockpass making it possible to verify someone sufficiently for KYC purposes without at any point putting personal information at risk of disclosure.
2. What benefits do you think Blockchain will bring to your industry?
The Blockchain’s great strengths are why it will be a significant innovator or augmentor for many industries. These include, among public blockchains, data immutability, security, anonymity, transparency, and disintermediation. The Bitcoin blockchain itself has 100% uptime and never been backed since its launch. Additionally, smart contracts, which are software protocols that facilitate, verify, enforce performance of preset conditions, that can tie into those blockchain strengths to create effective distributed applications like Blockpass that are automated and self-reliant.
3. What impact do you expect Blockchain to have on your business?
Blockpass is first being developed as an identity gateway for bringing enterprises members of the blockchain ecosystem into compliance using blockchain itself. We also have a longer term goal of bringing mainstream financial services to the blockchain to disintermediate and reduce the cost of infrastructure and the cost of doing business.
4. What will it take for Blockchain to go mainstream?
Improving three areas is key to taking the Blockchain mainstream, usability, transaction speed and scalability. I do not believe Bitcoin will ever achieve these goals, and it is taking Ethereum a long time to improve them as well. However, all of these can solved by developing better consensus protocols, and there are other, newer blockchains being developed that are probably only a few years from achieving success. These could include NEO, EOS, Cardano or QTUM.
That said, the blockchain has already disrupted one industry, venture capital. In 2017, initial coin offerings or ICOs raised more funding than early stage venture capital for startups. This was all possible because an Ethereum smart contract standard, called ERC20, made it very easy to create digital tokens based on the Ethereum blockchain and sell them in public offerings for funds.
5. How important to do you consider collaboration on Blockchain to be within industries?
There has to be some collaboration within industries in the form of consortiums. That is why we have seen them emerge in industries like banking and insurance. I have my doubts about private, permissioned blockchains but it would be enabling and secure if there are large amounts of participants within in a particular industry vertical.
6. Where do you see restrictions in Blockchain technology currently and how can they be overcome?
We can see regulations coming to the blockchain sector for the phenomenon of ICOs. In the past, most of these digital token offerings were not compliant with regulations in many countries, as they raised funds from people anonymously. There have been different responses to blockchain-based crowdfunding method, from the fairly negative in China, US and South Korea to more positive in countries like Japan and Singapore. Blockpass is well positioned to meet the needs of regulation and compliance as it is seamless and quick, is a shared platform, allows users to do KYC process once for using many different services, and for the platform’s merchants and enterprises reduces the cost of onboarding users.
7. How should Blockchain be regulated?
Obviously, there are significant benefits to the decentralized, distributed nature of Blockchain technology. However, it still needs to operate in a world that has regulations and compliance requirements. So, in terms of fulfilling some the requirements of financial regulators, this is a reality.
8. How can DLTs be used to better serve customers?
As I indicated, in the case of Blockpass, we are using our user centric, user controlled identity application to reduce the inconvenience users in having to constantly go through the KYC and AML process for every new financial service. For emerging enterprises like in the blockchain ecosystem, Blockpass through the
Blockchain offers a KYC platform-as-a-service where they can share infrastructure and reduce the process of on-boarding their customers.
9. What will be the impact of smart contracts across enterprise?
The benefits that smart contracts can bring to business and commerce include automation, self-reliance/self-execution, elimination of third parties, reduction in transaction costs, and enabling distributed applications.
10. What are the challenges of taking Blockchain from proof of concept to live deployment?
The challenges of taking Ethereum blockchain distributed applications to deployment include the immaturity of the technology. Ethereum needs to address limits to scalability, transaction speed, and usability. Nonetheless, Ethereum developers are working on solutions for these issues, and there are some newer blockchain that could also address these issues through use of more advanced consensus protocols.
About Blockchain Summit
Blockchain Summit Frankfurt is a 1-day conference and exhibition connecting over 700 industry leaders, business decision makers, tech innovators and investors.
Based on unrivalled content and exceptional networking opportunities, Blockchain Summit is the largest dedicated Blockchain Event in Europe. No co-located side events. A purely Blockchain focused audience.
Join us on the 26th of April for THE Blockchain-for-business event in 2018. Click here to register!
For more information please call the Blockchain Frankfurt team on +44 (0) 330 335 3900
