WEF and Blockchains
The World Economic Forum is a Swiss non-profit organization which can be regarded as the most influential think-tank in the world. Even world leaders consider it a big honor to be invited to speak at the WEF annual summit in Davos. For this reason, it is quite interesting to watch which issues receive WEF attention and trigger study groups, etc.
They have established a Blockchain Council, i.e. a high-profile study group to " explore how the Blockchain could impact industry, governments and society in the future, and design innovative governance models that ensure that their benefits are maximized and the associated risks kept under control." Council membership is an interesting blend, as it includes key industry players such as people from Ripple, Hyperledger, etc, as well as academics.
Looking at the main WEF blockchain archive page, the specific use cases which are analyzed in detail are supply chain/transport and providing banking-like services to the unbanked. Although the articles do not yield any new insight to blockchain-aware people, the very fact that such use cases are covered extensively signals strong WEF attention, which amounts to a very visible endorsement as a global issue and opportunity.
In summary....if the WEF talks about something (in particular: a technology), this is regarded by the most influential people on earth as validation of the technology's relevance with respect to global issues.
So, all this blockchain talk is good news for all of us ;-)
Thanks Claudio for this post ;)
Great news because if the think-tanks pay attention to it then it's important. They don't waste time opening a whole Council for something that's useless. There's great potential with blockchain and all associated technologies and this attention will drive its market value even higher. Thanks for sharing this, I had no idea a council had been established at WEF!
at this moment i dont understand what is that HF19 and its that a good thing or a baaad thing
Interesting, hope that they won't figure out a way to control this too.
I think a lot of talk surrounding this initially will be about the regulation of blockchain.
Yup - helps us to be seen as "not fools" and "not mad", if not yet sages...but still "out there"