An Open Letter to UK Banks

Dear UK Banks,

If your internal architecture for transactions does not look like the Libra one, be worried. You have had a decade to adapt to cryptography and public key methods, and the mixture of permissioned and permissionless blockchains, and smart contracts illustrates the platform of the future. Whole new financial ecosystems will now be build around these more open systems, and not around your closed door methods.

You have spent decades building up a reputation for trustworthiness, but now you must fully adapt to the rise of public key signing, and remove yourself from your digit-based methods of the past. Account IDs, sort codes, and simple checksums are just a bunch of numbers, whereas private keys and hashes provide a unique identities and also provide high levels of integrity. Your confidential world, too, is not really confidential anymore, and you must adopt ways to preserve your customer’s data within more open spaces, and detect fraud in an instance.

I know you love your SWIFT network infrastructure, and it has served you well in scaling around the world, but it is old, untrustworthy and crumbling. The Libra architecture shows the model of the future of SWIFT, and if it does not adapt quickly, it will crumble as an infrastructure for financial payments. If you do not make provisions for this, you too will be affected.

There is a whole new market evolving, and this time we trade not in equivalents of paper money, but in tokens and crypto assets. We will enact not through…