Author: Michael J. Casey
Release Date: September 28, 2017
Abstract:
A new phenomenon—initial coin offerings—enabled through blockchain technology is upending basic tenets of 20th century capitalism. This project studies the development and ramification of the emerging token economy, its viability, and the legal and policy ramifications in terms of securities law and property rights.
Within each industry, distributed ledger technology is influencing the value chain and the role of a CFO. This project outlines why the CFO, as the CEO’s business partner, should understand blockchain’s impact on enterprise strategy, not just on corporate finance, capital investment, and operations. It shows how blockchain could catalyze change in the near term, with finance use cases in taxation, accounting and audit processes and in digital asset payments for consumer goods, employee payroll, and cross-border transactions. In the longer term, CFOs will help make the business case for blockchain applications in trade finance, supply chain financing, and insurance. To prepare for that future, CFOs must understand token economics, initial coin offerings, and blockchain-based analytics.
Read MoreThis project explains the key interoperability challenges that the blockchain pioneers need to solve. It covers the business and technical foundations of interoperability, namely decisions about user identity (keys and signatures), security of assets (cryptography), notaries of off-chain events (oracles and Byzantine committees), block relays (sidechains and pegs) between a local chain and a foreign one, gateways of communication, and network architecture. It surveys the five major interoperability projects, and it explores the use case of cross-border trade, defining the problem it solves as well as the advantages of the solution it provides. Finally, this project includes an appendix that covers concepts behind interoperability such as atomic swap, practical Byzantine fault tolerance, dogfooding, and Shamir secret sharing.
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