Image of The Week, February, 25 — March, 1: Fortune, Coinspeaker, MarketWatch and Others
Bill Barhydt, the chief executive of a Bitcoin-based app called Abra, proved to be a non-supporter of private blockchains during his speech in the latest Fortune’s “Balancing The Ledger” show. From Barhydt’s point of view, the open cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin will prevail over their closed clones and versions that traditional businesses usually prefer. He described the whole situation as similar to how the public Internet defeated the private networks in past decades. The recent Fortune article also features a few other skeptical visions on the future of blockchain with some experts calling its development “stagnated” and promising it a miserable collapse.
MarketWatch, on the contrary, cites the KPMG query that shows the signs of growing optimism around blockchain in the tech sector. “Almost half of technology executives surveyed said it is likely or very likely that blockchain will change how their company does business in the next three years, with 41% of respondents also indicating that their company will implement blockchain in the next three years,” wrote Tegan Keele, U.S. blockchain program lead at KPMG. The research also discovered that found that 23% of respondent companies see improvement in business efficiencies as the main benefit of blockchain technology, 12% see it as a tool for them to stand out from competitors and 9% proclaim cost reduction as the biggest advantage of blockchain adoption.
Cole Petersen from News BTC looked back at the history of the blockchain framework discussion in Russian official quarters. And here’s why. This week President Vladimir Putin has issued another order to the government demanding that they draft and approve a regulatory framework for the crypto industry by July 2019. This seems like a positive sign for the industry if we ignore the fact that similar orders have been issued on multiple occasions over the past few years. The deadline to adopt the government-proposed regulations of crypto exchanges was also set by the Russian Duma to mid-February. And it was also pushed back. According to Russian officials, the goal of these regulations is to encourage the development of a digital economy within Russia. However, it now seems, investors are not holding their breath.