Blockchain technology is being adopted by firms into new domains far removed from just cryptocurrencies these days. One recent example of this is Factom that last week signed a deal to integrate its solution with Ancun Zhengxin’s electronic data notarization services in China . We asked Peter Kirby, Factom CEO, for his insights about what other industries can benefit from the innovative technology, its current limits and more.
How did the partnership with Ancun Zhengxin come about?
Our CTO, Jack Lu, had a personal connection with the head of Ancun Zhengxin. Their core business is providing a digital notary service, so an immutable (write once, never unwrite) audit trail provided by the blockchain was a natural fit.
What other industries do you see blockchain technology disrupting in the coming years?
The blockchain lets multiple parties agree on a single version of the truth. It creates a permanent audit trail for what happened. This will revolutionize any business where you have to trust a counter party. Now instead of trusting contracts, or courts, or people… you can trust the math.
The biggest market in the world is the debt market. Once we have better collateral like titles secured by blockchain and better contracts that can self-execute — we can build vastly more efficient lending systems and secondary markets for lending products.
How do you build tamper proof titles with blockchain technology?
It’s pretty straight forward. Build a database of title records with restricted administrator rights and use the blockchain as a permanent audit trail for that system. Any unauthorized changes in the title database can be rolled back to the correct version in the blockchain.Solving the “garbage in, equals garbage out” problem is more challenging. We need to track the process of creating a title record across all steps. The lawyers […]
