In May 2020, Deloitte mapped out 4 potential scenarios for the global travel and hospitality industry to get to the “next normal.” Each scenario evaluated known unknowns such as disease severity, government collaboration, healthcare response, economic consequences, and social cohesion.

Its conclusion arrived at several overarching themes, which would need to be addressed in order to rebuild consumer confidence and reengage the travel and hospitality industry at large.

The following analysis is grounded in the central themes of Deloitte’s assessment with a focus on how blockchain and distributed ledger technologies (DLTs) can reduce friction and increase transparency, ultimately improving trust in a trustless environment. …

Originally published in Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor, May 2020

Today bitcoin futures are available for retail and institutional traders, but U.S. investors have limited options for investing directly in Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). Let’s look back at the history of ETFs to see how Bitcoin ETFs could enable U.S. investors to invest directly, and what options are currently available.

Learning Form ETF History

In 1989, the first attempt at an ETF hit the American Stock Exchange. …

Originally published in Forbes CryptoAsset & Blockchain Advisor, April 2020

In September 2015, bitcoin became the world’s first digitally native commodity when it was officially designated as a tradeable commodity by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). In the U.S., there’s still not an easy way to invest in bitcoin through an exchange-traded fund product, but we have futures-based products that reward the trader, not the investor. Let’s look back at this radical shift in designation to see how the CFTC paved the way for the financialization of crypto derivatives like bitcoin futures.

What Are Crypto Derivatives?

In the same way that traditional derivative products derive value from an underlying asset, crypto derivatives derive their value from underlying crypto assets like bitcoin. However, unlike traditional commodities like gold and oil, bitcoin is digitally native. This means that it does not need to first exist as a physical commodity like bricks of gold or barrels of oil in order to be digitized and traded online. …

In traditional spot and derivatives markets, recent trends in user experience such as zero fee trades, robo advisors, and high yield brokerage accounts are becoming commonplace. Younger demographics like millennials, who started working during the great recession, are now able to dip their toes into stock, bond, and ETF investing at their own pace.

This market shift is also made possible because of powerful new technologies, giant merger and acquisition deals (see Schwab & TD Ameritrade and Morgan Stanley & E-Trade), and relaxed corporate tax regulations. The long term impact of these trends is yet to be seen. …

“Trust starts with truth and ends with truth.” — Santosh Kalwar

Today managing Intellectual Property (IP) rights is a slow and burdensome process that puts the responsibility of registration, settlement and reconciliation on the IP owner first and foremost. For content creators, this creates an obstacle to enforcing their rights over content monetization. For licensed publishers and distributors, the lack of IP accessibility and oversight creates a grey area that 3rd parties take advantage of and profit from.

Blockchain technologies promise a more efficient way to create and maintain shared records of intellectual property rights, benefiting creators, publishers, and distributors alike.

In order to understand where and how cost efficiencies can be achieved, we must first understand the current process for establishing IP. Currently, there are different procedures that must be followed in order to create IP, which vary by geography, jurisdiction, and type of intellectual property. In the US, copyright protection is established the moment an original work of authorship is “created and fixed in a tangible form that is perceptible either directly or with the aid of a machine or device.” …

Centralized services like Facebook, Microsoft, and Yahoo keep all your eggs in one basket. This means that bad actors only need to attack one weak link to compromise all your data. And there are many ways to do it, including DDoS, Man-in-the-Middle, and credential stealing to name a few. Decentralized services keep your data safe and secure by distributing it across many redundant servers with cutting-edge cryptography that ensures your data is complete, immutable, and incorruptible. Of course, there are many degrees of decentralization. …

In the early days of crypto, privacy was a critical focus in blockchain development but difficult for the average user to achieve. From 2011–2014, creating multi-signature transactions was considered a cutting-edge technique that provided advanced users more privacy and security than executing standard peer-to-peer transactions alone. Now multisig is standard and more user friendly than ever. So, what’s changed in the last 5 years? And when can we expect blockchains to deliver practical privacy for non-technical users and businesses?

New Privacy-Preserving Protocols

Bitcoin executes pseudo-anonymous transactions, meaning that transaction records are slightly obfuscated but can be figured out by analyzing the public blockchain ledger. While early onlookers of Bitcoin heralded it for anonymous transactions, this was never really the case. …