Stop Asking if Blockchain Projects Are in Production Yet, Chase Says
Financial services have been experimenting with blockchain projects for quite a while now.
In fact, 2017 seems to be the year blockchain is set to break out of the Proof-of-Concept stage and into production environments — yes, even for banks.
But driving blockchain experiments into real-life adoptions is a considerable journey, and big enterprises don’t like to be rushed.
“It’s frustrating to constantly be asked ‘when are you going to production,’” Amber Baldet, blockchain program lead at JPMorgan Chase, said at the Blockchain + Digital Currencies conference today. “We look at it as a journey; we need to be cautious about building systems of tomorrow, with today’s limitations.”
Those limitations include privacy and regulatory concerns, as well as transaction limitations, according to Baldet. “The technology is moving fast, and we want to make sure that [what we build today] will stand the next generation’s test of time,” she added.
Chase is quite ahead in its blockchain journey: the bank launched Quorum — an open-source ethereum-powered blockchain platform — in partnership with EthLab late last year, and is also a member of the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
What the bank has learned so far, is that “blockchain is not a technology problem,” Baldet said.”We can throw hundreds of developers and millions of dollars at this problem, but it’s still a network coordination problem,” she explained. “I believe that the technology is going to get there, no problem. But our [banks’] task is to ‘coopetition’ enough to actually create a viable ecosystem for ourselves.”
Another challenge for large enterprises, aiming to take blockchain to production, is getting “all their clients on board,” Jennifer Peve, executive director of FinTech Strategy at DTCC said on the panel.
“Before getting anything to production your organization needs to make sure that your clients — and their banks — are ready as much as you are,” she said. “It’s more than just getting the technology to do something,” the focus needs to be on the end product, Peve added.
