In terms of building trust in the media ecosystem, what have we learned from the visibility provided by blockchain to date? From a traditional finance lens, what challenges are being solved here in this segment?
Verma starts off the conversation: “You look at the traditional financial infrastructure and you ask yourself, if I want to trade a stock on the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq, it takes two days to settle that stock. And whereas on the blockchain and defi (crypto), if you want to settle a transaction it takes as little as a few minutes and maybe for larger transactions an hour or two to settle. If you look at blockchain, you can trade 24-7, 365. If you look at moving funds from your personal bank account to a brokerage account, it’s cumbersome, it’s time consuming. It takes a few days. Your existing providers are reluctant to lose the assets, and they make it very difficult for you to move assets while in defi, you can self-custody your assets. And so if you want to move your assets from one defi protocol to another, you simply do it yourself. It’s a few minutes to move your funds and nobody can stop you.”
If you look at the existing legacy infrastructures, it is antiquated. How can we benefit from the new media ecosystem?
“The existing financial planners will make marginal changes, but none of them will make disruptive changes to their business models. And so what you really need is something disrupted like decentralized finance often referred to as defi to come in,” continues Verma. “There’s entrepreneurs who are innovating and creating new business models from the ground up. And so that’s what it’s going to take to change existing financial infrastructure. Defi is going to result in a customer experience that’s quicker, cheaper, faster, more personable and more transparent.”
So we’ve got the current financial system and the new media ecosystem. By providing transparency in blockchains, we can get there, and that leads to measurement and efficiencies.
“The two can come together, as realized from a marketing and data perspective,” says Gao. “I think what we see is a misconception that crypto and making transactions on chain can be very private. But everything is on chain and public. For the most part, every single transaction can be seen on chain. So there’s a lot of ways to analyze all of the data If you have the right parsers or if you have the right kind of lens when you’re viewing the information.”
Gao points to the virtual wallet, which has delivered more context to financial transactions. He says, “The wallet became the crypto wallet which holds tokens and/or access by a private key that the owner of the wallet has. Can this become the next generation cookie, that people understand today? And with the tracking of users, and making it more difficult for applications to track users, there may need to be new ways to identify and deliver appropriate ads. Brands can take advantage of this new form of data that’s getting moved. A key insight here is that you have a different type of data that you’re tracking. And another way for brands is this concept of data unions being able to store user data across different publishers. That’s something that blockchain can enable. And using that, you have the ability to share and be able to identify users across different mediums.”
But what about integrating blockchain into traditional enterprise systems? What are some of the challenges?
Chiu notes, “In terms of integrating blockchains with traditional enterprise systems and workflows, we believe that’s been one of the barriers to adoption for launching the enterprise. But blockchain springs a lot of benefits, such as transparency, it’s always up and is permissionless. But without the ability to integrate blockchain applications with existing enterprise workflows, it makes it difficult for existing enterprise to really take advantage of these benefits without substantially reengineering their processes or jumping through a lot of hoops just to get data out of the system blockchain applications. This is why we are focused as a company on developing blockchain solutions to address these pain points.”
View the full video for more on Seth Adler’s conversation with Gagan Verma, Yida Gao, and Alan Chiu, as they discuss blockchain’s infrastructure, interoperability with enterprise software, plus the potential intersection of AI and blockchain.
