Jag DeSaint: The Future of Blockchain Is…Boring

The biggest blockchain story of the last year or so — other than a plethora of ICO scams and bitcoin crashing about 67% from its $19,783 December 2017 high — has been the steady stream of powerful mainstream figures and companies who have declared blockchain is the next big thing for…something.

In that context, it seems almost a given that after leaving the Trump White House to spend more time driving his Tesla and playing golf in the Hamptons, Gary Cohn would pop up next doing blockchain…something. And so he has. As reported by the Financial Times, the former Goldman Sachs chief operating officer has become an advisor to Spring Labs, which is building a way to use blockchain to share consumer credit data among banks.

Also advising Spring Labs: the former head of the FDIC, the former head of McKinsey’s financial institutions practice, a former deputy director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the former president and COO of Oracle, the founder of Victory Park Capital, and so on.

It’s not a group of anarcho-capitalists with Tor browsers and a passion for anonymized purchases of guns and hallucinogens.

And that makes total sense: If you’re selling what you hope is going to be the next generation of back-office bank software, you don’t bring Julian Assange on board.

Blockchain’s future, the new story seems to go, is about being boring. Everyone knows what the cool cryptocurrencies are good for. The question people like Gary Cohn are trying to answer is what exactly boring blockchain is for.