Joseph Lubin, the founder of ConsenSys, a Brooklyn, New York-based “venture production studio” focused on “building and scaling tools” and “enterprise software products” for Ethereum, has said that “we’re seeing an astonishing range of industries interested in blockchain.”Lubin, whose net worth has been estimated (by Forbes) to be around $1 to $5 billion, noted in a short video (published on March 12th on ConsenSys Media’s Youtube channel) that “virtually any industry that values trust can benefit from blockchain.” He argued that blockchain is “essentially the new trust infrastructure” as the distributed ledger helps us move “from a world of subjective trust to a world of automated trust and guaranteed execution.”
Not Having To Rely On Costly Intermediaries
Lubin continued:
Instead of relying on intermediaries to provide trust in different situations, in different industries … content creators or service providers or resource providers can directly access and interact with their consumers.
He then questioned "which industry does not fall into that pattern?" - while adding that “early on we saw the financial industry get very interested in this technology.” According to Lubin’s assessment, financial institutions or service providers initially took interest in blockchain technology because “they were a little concerned about disintermediation, but also I think they recognized there would be tokenization of differents kinds of assets.”He furhter noted:
[Financial service providers also took interest because they believed] there would be the creation of natively digital assets like cryptocurrencies, like crypto equities, crypto bonds, asset-backed tokens [such as] precious metals, diamonds, real estate or money itself.
Realizing the potential of being able to tokenize real-word assets by issuing cryptographic currencies, financial industry players “jumped in pretty quickly,” Lubin said:Banks are now using cryptocurrencies to “build more efficient systems, to build shared sources of truth for reference data,” Lubin noted. He also revealed that organizations are increasingly taking interest in cryptoassets - which has led to major banks setting up digital asset trading desks.
"No Longer Requiring Centralized Depositories"
Moreover, institutions are exploring ways to leverage blockchain to develop infrastructure “where you may no longer need a centralized depository for different kinds of securities,” Lubin explained. For example, “you could have a body of different actors in the financial industry that are custodians of a protocol, but they don’t actually have to be custodians of the physical assets themselves because a much more robust system is a decentralized system where there are copies of all the different nodes on the network.” This, Lubin said, gives everyone collective ownership of the platform, as no single entity really owns or “singularly controls it.”