

On Tuesday morning, the Financial and ICT committee discussed about the impact of blockchain technology. The speakers for the session included Head of Product, Asia Pacific, Visa TS Anil and Senior Director, Innovation & Strategic Partnership, Asia Pacific, Visa Klas Hesselman.
The speakers covered three main questions during the meeting. 1) What is blockchain? 2) Why are the institutions launching them? 3) What are some smart people doing with them?
One of the current blockchain initiatives presented was London based startup Everledger. It has a global digital ledger which is able to collate dozens of cross-reference-able data points on each individual diamond in order to inject transparency into the market and eliminate associated criminal activity.
Blockchain, with the distributed ledger technology provides a new system to govern payments without the assistance of intermediate agents such as central banks. Transaction histories involving bitcoin are recorded on an open ledger such as the blockchain.