Interview with Reinhard Berger, a former business architect for global consulting firm Accenture, redefined the global banking system for clients such as Credit Suisse, UBS, and Invesco. As the Founder & CEO of Pecunio, a decentralized investment platform that focuses on cryptocurrencies and blockchain asset hedge funds, he and his team are contributors to the financial services revolution.
Q. Can you give us some insight about what is happening in the Fintech sphere right now?
A. Right now we are talking about an actual Fintech revolution. Innovations or additional applications are presented almost daily! A lot of smart heads around the globe are discovering new ways on how to make transactions faster, applications smarter, and systems more secure. They even start to invent how to combine different blockchains.
Ark, for example, develops a smart bridge technology on how to connect different blockchains to one big spider net of chains.
This would allow cross-communication between different cryptocurrencies and would affect the crypto as well as our financial world enormously. Just think of how much faster transactions could be handled combining all blockchains and leveraging each chain’s speed.
This would also buffer high transaction volumes for a single currency and distributes the high volume to the whole network, which would assure a stable transaction speed.
Arks blockchain has a block time of 8 sec as writing.
Think about it: How long did your last transaction to your cousin on the other side of the world take via traditional wire transfer?
This is just one of those many projects that are happening on the playground of ground breaking technologies.
Q. Can you explain to us what a DAO is?
A. A DAO (decentralized autonomous organization) is an organization that does not need to be led by a person or company.
It is an organization that is run by computer programs called smart contracts, which encode the company’s rules. Ideally, a DAO is stateless, and not tied to any particular nation-state. This has many advantages, but many uncertainties as well. Legal questions of how government regulators are going to handle issues with DAOs are yet to be determined.
There is no head office or central which you could easily turn off to interrupt the system. It is decentral, and therefore a network like an internet spread all over the world on hundreds of thousands of computing systems.
With a DAO there is no middle man or 3rd party organization needed to operate the system.
Due to that fact, the operating costs are meager. Work efficiency within the organization can be increased.
Q. How has blockchain technology evolved?
A. Plans of a blockchain occurred in early 1990; the first publicly distributed blockchain, however, was the Bitcoin blockchain in 2009. It is the concept of anonymous peer-to-peer value exchange on the internet.
The Ethereum blockchain went live in 2015 and did not only give us the possibility to exchange value but also to create so-called “smart contracts” on the blockchain. These smart contracts allow programming of rules and processes that are performed by third-party intermediaries and centralized at stake. There are many use cases already in logistics, real estate management and cross-border payments for example.
There’s even a new form of the distributed ledger which doesn’t only work linear called “tangle.” Every device performing a transaction functions as a node itself automatically verifying new transactions. This fact eliminates transaction fees and solves the problem of scalability. IOTA was designed for machine-to-machine communication and is an interesting concept in theory. What we need though, are use cases and real- live implementations.
Exciting times we live in!
Q. So will banks utilize blockchain technology anytime soon?
A. They already do! In September 2016, Barclays Bank (UK) carried out the world’s first trade transaction using the blockchain. Barclays cut a process that usually takes 7– 10 days down to less than four hours. Just a few days ago, the Bank of America won a patent for an automated cryptocurrency exchange system. Roughly 80% of banks are recently developing their blockchain technology or at least trying to.
Q. How can one contribute to the Fintech revolution?
A. People see huge potential in the blockchain sphere not only from a technological perspective but also from an investment perspective.
Getting into crypto at the moment is not yet user-friendly enough. The barriers are just too high, and the typical mid age investor doesn’t want to deal with complications, tech, and private keys.
That is where opportunities come along. The market is in need of different investment solutions. Solutions which allow both saving and spending of crypto assets safely and easily where people could easily invest into well-chosen bluechip-blockchain assets: Cryptocurrencies, ICOs, and tokenized funds.