Speaking at the World Economic Forum event this week, former CFTC chair Christopher Giancarlo is suggesting that it’s time to usher in digital assets that work with the American economy.
“During my five years at the commission we saw this sort of new wave of the digitization of our world that’s taking place,” said “crypto Dad” Giancarlo, as reported at Coindesk. “The first wave was the digitization of information, and that’s created the Internet as we know it today. But we’re seeing what some people call the digitization of value, or the or the Internet of value.”
In a way, Giancarlo’s remarks echo the types of narratives that you see from Gen Xers (Ed Snowden in “Permanent Record, for one) talking about the evolution of the Internet – as the Internet matured, we saw very different types of utilization, and we came to see the Internet as a familiar part of our lives. Cryptocurrencies and digital assets maybe next, paving the way for financial transactions that look very differently for our children than they did for us.
Giancarlo also makes an interesting analogy to national infrastructure, suggesting that like the aging bridges, toll roads and airports and hospitals of our national landscape, the financial systems that America uses have also been neglected.
“I’ve been also thinking a lot about how so much of our physical infrastructure – our bridges, our tunnels, our airports – have been allowed to age and decay,” he said. “They were state of the art in the fifties and sixties. They are well past their sell-by day today… so much of our financial infrastructure has also been allowed to age and decay and not been modernized.”
He’s not the only one.
“In many cases, companies are still using relatively rudimentary content management platforms, or DAM infrastructures that have been cobbled together from piecemeal solutions,” wrote Nuxeo VP of Marketing Dave Jones recently at Finance Digest, calling for more modern handling of digital assets. “This leaves FS marketing teams at the mercy of poor visibility and coordination, and general inefficiency as users have to hunt around for the latest versions of files, or to understand how and where digital assets are being used.”
So if former regulators and industry people agree – look for quick innovation in crypto and blockchain support in 2020.
