The Keynote World Blockchain Forum in London has concluded this week with 3 projects winning a share of the £150,000 prize fund donated by tech start-up incubator Victory Square Technologies.
Winnings were allocated between enterprising media platform providers AlphaNetworks, blockchain data integrity platform Cognida, and Platio which is setting out to become the world’s first integrated platform for banking, brokerage, stocks and crypto.
Ideological Differences
The prize presentations rounded off a varied programme of discussions that had included speakers Dollar Vigilante Jeff Berwick; Bitcoin Cash’s Roger Ver; Marjan Delatinne, the Global head of Banking at Ripple; and Richard Crook from the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS).
The discussions themselves often reflected the ideological divide that blockchain technology has spawned, notably with Richard Crook, Head of Emerging Technology at RBS stating his own belief that future digital currency banks would “not be de-similar to traditional ones.”
In response, during perhaps the most impassioned presentation of the event, Abraham Cambridge from the SunExchange reminded the audience why such an outcome may not be desirable by drawing attention to the original messaged embedded message in the Bitcoin genesis block – “Chancellor on brink of second bailout for the banks,” itself a reference to a headline from the January 3rd 2009 edition of The Times newspaper, the day on which the Bitcoin network recorded its first transaction, and in which reference was made to a government bail-out program for banks which included the funnelling of an estimated £45 billion funnelled to RBS.
