You can add R Jesse McWaters, financial innovation lead at the World Economic Forum (WEF), to the growing chorus of industry voices warning that we’ve reached a "peak" when it comes to the hype surrounding blockchain technology.
"I’m trepidatious about inflated expectations re: the blockchain," McWaters said in a new interview, the comments coming as he described the ongoing "awakening" he’s seen among major financial institutions in regards to the technology.
While even the WEF itself has lauded blockchain as a global " mega-trend ", McWaters worries that such language may encourage institutions to overlook the serious challenges facing the further development of the technology.
McWaters told CoinDesk: "There can be a tendency to assume that the technology not only enables a distributed financial architecture, but makes the transition to it easy. I think that nothing could be further from the case." McWaters said that through his work with the Swiss non-profit, he’s drawing the conclusion that process will need to be realigned, stakeholders will need to standardize data policies and regulators will need to understand blockchain systems should the ecosystem want to achieve stable growth.
"It’s wonderful to see the awakening, but we need to see that this excitement is tempered by patience and that taking the tech from pilots to full-scale implementation will be measured not in months and not in years, but maybe decades," he continued.
McWaters also took aim at comparisons between the blockchain and Internet industries, cautioning that what is often lost in this comparison is the amount of time this transition took.
"Many of those discussion points," he added, "weren’t fully realized until the 2010s." Explorations ahead
Still, the WEF is on the verge of conducting trials of its own.Launched in 2014 , the WEF has been increasing its focus in understanding disruptive innovations as part of a larger […]
