While attention and information on the blockchain went from hype to quality last year, by 2020 technology has already begun to address the challenges that will allow it to have a greater social impact, says Sheila Warren, head of Blockchain and Distributed Ledger Technology at the World Economic Forum (WEF), the organizer of the Davos annual meeting. However, the business-oriented projects likely to be successful this year will be those that demonstrate adequate governance and a collaborative approach, he added.
What Warren said
Warren says that in 2019 the Forum “has seen fewer established actors enter a competition on unilateral projects. Instead, we have seen totally internal initiatives or creative attempts to build a consortium (for example Food Trust, TradeLens, Libra, International Association for Trusted Blockchain Applications INATBA), with varying degrees of success.
Companies are waking up and starting to understand the fact that to go far, it is necessary to go together ”. Building on this trend, last October, the organization launched a consortium, the Mining and Metals Blockchain Initiative, to explore the use of blockchain in the mining and metals industries. Its founding members include Antofagasta Minerals, Eurasian Resources Group, Glencore, Klöckner & Co, Minsur SA, Tata Steel Limited and Anglo American / De Beers.
The blockchain platform designed is useful "to address the problems of transparency, the traceability of materials, the reporting of carbon emissions or to increase efficiency", and many officially recognize that such a collaborative approach would have been difficult to imagine even just a few years does. "We expect to see a similar collaborative approach from the public sector as progress is made in 2020, and in fact, the Forum has already seen greater availability by public sector agencies to share knowledge and challenges," he says Warren.
World Economic Forum and the CBDC project
In response to this latest development, the World Economic Forum runs a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) project that brings together more than 45 central banks in an attempt to explore the parameters for the proper dissemination of central bank digital currencies.
According to the project, the organization will launch its CBDC Policymaker Toolkit in Davos at the next annual WEF meeting on 21-24 January 2020. Based on these observations, the World Economic Forum expects this year to bring "more experimentation with hybrid blockchain models, both in the financial sector ", such as decentralized finance and" synthetic "Central Bank Digital Currency, and in the public sector, for example through an expanded use of smart contracts.
"We're not close to fulfilling the promise of truly decentralized systems, but space continues to evolve in new and exciting ways, and it's only a matter of time before something huge gains traction," according to Warren.
