When asked to explain this space, I often ask people to forget pretty much everything you've heard about blockchains, crypto-currencies, and bitcoin, and instead dumb it down a lot and think about something no more complex or intimidating than good old-fashioned database technology.
— Blythe Masters
I would describe Hyperledger as a tremendous opportunity for collaboration for firms that range from gigantic commercial concerns all the way to the smallest, newest startups. It's a community of great intellectual depth and great commercial breadth, and as such, I think the opportunity to be part of that is a unique and enriching experience.
Digital Asset has a revolutionary technology platform that eliminates the counterparty risk and lack of transparency that has hindered mainstream adoption of cryptographic technology. The possibilities for reducing cost and risk in settlement are enormous.
Just being able to trade financial commodities is a serious limitation because financial commodities represent only a tiny fraction of the reality of the real commodity exposure picture. We need to be active in the underlying physical commodity markets in order to understand and make prices.
Digital Asset has a revolutionary technology platform that eliminates the counterparty risk and lack of transparency that has hindered mainstream adoption of cryptographic technology.
I've always been motivated to innovate where the implications are significant.
Our view is that sensitive, contractual, market-moving, private data should be kept private.
I think the most important thing to understand about credit derivatives and their use at JPMorgan is they served a number of different purposes. First and foremost, they were a tool which initially was seen as being useful in managing the bank's own risk management challenges.
A credit derivative, at its core, is actually a very simple concept... The simplest way to think of a credit derivative is it is analogous to insurance against the risk of a credit default by your counterparty, your business counterpart.
I have a quantitative background, but really, derivatives appealed to me because they require so much creativity.
If you think about any multiparty process where shared information is necessary to the completion of transactions, and the coordination of activity and the exchange of value, that's where blockchain technology can be put to good use.
We all want a non-fragmented solution, but the utopian version of a single blockchain to rule them all is undesirable and impractical.
Blockchain technology represents a generational opportunity to mutualize database infrastructure across entities within financial services. What that translates into is an enormous cost-saving, risk-reducing, and capital-enhancing opportunity.
I had seen the financial crisis unfold, and I had seen the credit derivatives market get operationally ahead of itself, which resulted in systemic risk counterparty exposures. I began to believe that distributed ledgers had the capability to tackle that problem.
The idea that commodities, as an asset class, is finished is just fundamentally flawed.
It was amazing feeling to be able to be involved in invention, but not just invention - the creating of a marketplace that had real value to add.
With private chains, you can have a completely known universe of transaction processors. That appeals to financial institutions that are wary of the bitcoin blockchain.
Distributed ledger technology is fashionable. In fact, if you could wear it, you'd put Ralph Lauren out of business, at least in my case.
The thing about innovation in financial markets is they're always building on what has come before. It's a natural process.
In bypassing barriers between different classes, maturities, rating categories, debt seniority levels and so on, credit derivatives are creating enormous opportunities to exploit and profit from associated discontinuities in the pricing of credit risk.
It is noticeable how many times you see a panel at a conference made up of all men or look into the audience and see very few women, whether it is an event focused on technology or business.
Blockchain technology, or distributed ledger technology, is just a way of using the modern sciences of encryption to enable entities to share a common infrastructure for database retention.
The Hyperledger Project is gaining traction on a daily basis, displaying how vital this effort is in advancing distributed ledger technology. Uniting the industry to drive this initiative forward is paramount to the success of distributed ledger technology.
Digital Asset has a talented team and technology that is uniquely positioned to solve challenging settlement issues facing global financial institutions.
The platforms that are big, global, diversified, and both financial and physically enabled are competitively much better positioned than those which are not.
If you exclude your talent base from the benefits of hiring and deploying and making women successful, you're going to do less well than businesses that do a better job on that front.
Unfortunately, tools that transfer risk can also increase systemic risk if major counterparties fail to manage their own risk exposures properly.
I spent my whole career thinking about risk, markets, infrastructure, and regulation. I had seen the financial crisis unfold, and I had seen the credit derivatives market get operationally ahead of itself, which resulted in systemic risk counterparty exposures. I began to believe that distributed ledgers had the capability to tackle that problem.
You have to abide by the regulations that the regulators insist on. This is not a philosophical divide - it's a fact of life.
The credit derivative market would never have evolved but for the preexistence of the derivative markets because so much of the technology was borrowed.
The blockchain is the financial challenge of our time. It is going to change the way that our financial world operates.
In financial services, the front end of the world operates at super-high speeds: comparative advantages are measured in fractions of nanoseconds. And yet back end processes - the amount of time you have to wait when you sell a stock before cash hits your account - can take days.
