Italian tech expert: Bank blockchain system without native token is worthless

Ferdinando Ametrano, a professor at the Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy’s top technical universities, was recently interviewed at the Blockchain Currency Conference. He poured cold water on the blockchain hype surrounding banks, saying that it was ridiculous for banks and financial institutions to be committed to building a blockchain without a native digital currency.

Over the past two years, large banks and financial institutions around the world have been working on developing private chain networks and enterprise-level blockchain use cases for cross-border payment and settlement of assets.

Data from research firms such as Greenwich Associates indicate that 10亿美元is spent annually on blockchain research and development in the capital markets and financial industries. However, banks and financial institutions have been unable to come up with even a single commercial use case for blockchain technology.

There is a fundamental problem with banks’ blockchain research: they have not yet found a suitable way to integrate a decentralized system or network like blockchain technology into the existing financial services architecture.

Due to the strict regulatory framework, banks are unable to deploy decentralized blockchain networks. Therefore, they can only choose private or centralized blockchains. However, due to security considerations, such systems are also difficult to implement.

Ametrano said in an interview:

I don’t think Bitcoin will be the only blockchain. But a blockchain without a native digital asset is worthless to me. If there is no valuable currency or native token in the blockchain system to reward miners for distributed consensus, then a system transaction validator must be appointed. Otherwise, why would anyone use this blockchain with a low-level data architecture?

Ametrano further emphasized that there is no difference between centralized blockchain or trusted blockchain network and consortium chain, because the managers of the above systems operate the network under the authorization of users. He believes that if banks want to deploy centralized blockchain networks, they might as well directly adopt traditional databases, which may be cheaper and more practical.

Since you trust the validators you choose, you might as well just use database technology. There is no difference in the effects of the two (centralized blockchain and database).

Ametrano’s comments on the hype surrounding blockchain in the financial sector come as several large banks have announced their withdrawal from R3, a consortium that develops blockchain technology.

Recently, Morgan Stanley, Santander bank and Goldman Sachs chose to withdraw from R3's blockchain research and development team nearly two years after joining it due to lack of relevant progress.

At the end of October, some R3 members encountered financial crisis because they had invested millions of dollars in the research and development and deployment of blockchain technology in recent years.

At the time, R3 CEO David Rutter said:

In these tough economic times for banks, investing millions of dollars in obscure emerging technology projects is ill-timed.

While it’s hard to predict the future of blockchain research at R3 and other banks and financial institutions, it’s clear that the limitations of the technology and the industry are slowly emerging.