How blockchain will impact your industry & create new industries in New Zealand (Part 2)
AARON MCDONALD M2 SUCCESS SUMMIT
Centrality Co-Founder and CEO, Aaron McDonald spoke at the M2 Success Summit, in front of over 400 highly motivated entrepreneurs, business decision makers and high performers making their mark in the world of cutting edge technology. We’ve captured his speech verbatim in a previous blog post here. Below is the Q&A he had following his keynote presentation.
Q&A from Dominic Bowden
What is the take home? What are the first steps that they can do? How important is it to really know what’s under the hood?
Different people in your organisation would have to have a different level of understanding. But I think the most important thing to take away is that shared infrastructure view. How can we create cooperatives which share infrastructure where there isn’t an owner of that infrastructure and we can innovate freely with applications?
The second thing is we can now create new kinds of business models which don’t rely on these central parties to be in control to create valuable economies. That’s going to fundamentally change the way business can be done in the future. And you think about it, as a consumer, if I have the choice to use an application where the corporation gets all the benefit, or the community gets all the benefit — which one am I going to choose? That’s where consumers are going to want to go.
And that third thing is privacy. This privacy economy is coming, it’s going to be a juggernaut. If you’re not building stuff that puts the consumer privacy first, and puts them in control of their data, you’re going to be out of business.
You talk about big business in America and New Zealand is following. Give us some examples of how many big businesses are actually investing in this tech.
More than 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies are making active investments in this space or are actively building technology in this space. At least 80 percent of the top financial institutions of the world are building in this space. We are working with a number of them. I think one of the biggest holders of patents in this space is the Bank of America.
They might be talking about it in negative terms, to try and protect their dominant positions right now, but they are all actively building and investing in this technology behind the scenes. Don’t listen to what people say, look at what they do.
When are we going to be able to see some of the things you’re working on in the real world?
Sylo’s an active beta now, it’s the fastest growing decentralised app in the world. You can download Sylo from the App Store. And we’re about to turn that beta switch off soon, so we’re be pushing it hard.
A lot of that is around a messaging app right. If you simplify it, a lot of these apps are a blockchain version of Whatsapp.
The key difference is it works just like Whatsapp, except we don’t need someone running a data centre to do things like back your contacts up or store the relationship between you and your friends, or exchange keys for encryption, those kinds of things.
For all the toe dippers out there who want to get in and do some research, is Centrality the place to start? What would you encourage everyone here if they wanted to get a blockchain element into their business?
Check out our website, there are some cool blogs on there about how the technology works and the types of industries it’s been used in. We’re working with 30 different ventures in our portfolio around the world, so we’re across every type of industry. I’d encourage everyone to watch the documentaries on Netflix, Banking On Bitcoin or The Trust Machine. Those are two very good places to start to get a basic understanding of how this all works and what the change might be in the future.
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