By Stacey Mankoff for NewsBTC Recently we sat down with Jon Matonis, Founding Board Director of the Bitcoin Foundation and an e-Money researcher and economist focused on expanding the circulation of nonpolitical digital currencies. Jon currently advises startups in Bitcoin, iGaming, mobile and prepaid and with all this experience and knowledge, we had some questions to ask him: NewsBTC: What is it about blockchain that has drawn such strong interest? JM: From my perspective, it’s definitely coming on the heels of bitcoin from 2009, 2010. We’re now 6.5 years in bitcoin and the banks are trying to show progress in innovation and they’re looking at bitcoin and blockchain technology to do that. What’s exciting about it to the traditional banking industry? Let’s take for example two firms: Epiphyte and Abra Global – both of those companies leverage the capital – public blockchain – using it as a value transfer protocol. If you look at what is most exciting to investors in this space, particularly VCs, they see the bitcoin core protocol as a value transfer similar to HTTP and SMTP for email. These are globally accessible protocols. We haven’t had a standard protocol for value transfer before. This is what getting investment community excited. What about all this talk about a private blockchain? What’s the issue there? When you make the switch over to initiatives in R3 CEV and other consortiums in creating private blockchains, there are a number of things that change about that. You can make the comparison between the Internet vs. the Intranet. Public blockchains are seen as untameable Wild West and financial institutions look to develop private blockchains , bringing it in house and standardizing it. But then they strip out one of the most valuable and cost-savings features which is removing the intermediary. The […]
