About this blog

What would you do if you had the possibility of being part of a major disruptive innovation?

This question is something I have started asking myself since I started my internship in the Innovation Lab just a few months ago. My mission sounded simple at first: there’s this technology that have been gathering hype for a while, called the blockchain. We want you to research it.

I was initially skeptical

I had heard about the concept before but only in relation with talks about Bitcoin, which in my mind was a cryptographic currency with a mysterious inventor which is largely used by tech-fanatics and dark web criminals. Interesting tech for sure, but was there anything more to it than that?

It was not until I started researching that I realized what an audacious idea Bitcoin is: until cryptocurrencies came along, no one had the ability to transmit value at a distance without the permission and support of a third party. This is the core of what blockchain technology makes possible. This simple, but revolutionary idea of instant value transfer.

Then I joined the hype bandwagon

As I kept researching I started to become an enthusiast myself as I realized why people from both the tech side and the financial side are so excited for what this technology can offer. Bill Gates has called it “a technological tour de force”, and Bob Greifeld, CEO of NASDAQ, called Blockchain “the biggest opportunity set we can think of over the next decade or so”. The Blockchain can turn out to be as important as the web: if we think of the web as the world’s first “internet-scale open platform for information exchange”, we can think of the Blockchain as the world’s first “internet-scale open platform for value-exchange”, or just World Wide Ledger for short.

The comparison to the web is not for naught; Dozens of startups are making solutions in the design space and VC money is being invested in a manner comparable to the early days of the internet. What’s most surprising to me however, is that those who are supposed to be disrupted by these innovations, the financial institutions, are actually taking an active role in their own disruption. This is done not only for defensive reasons, but also because there are so many possibilities for improvement that this technology brings.

 

Blockchain illustration

 

Now I want to spread the gospel

It is for this reason that I started this blog, and the reason why I chose to name it “Share the ledger”. I intend for this blog to be a place where I can share interesting news and opinions on blockchain technology, and hopefully some of the results of my experimentation with the tech done here at EVRY.

2 thoughts on “About this blog

Leave a Reply to Peter Frøystad Cancel reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s