Justin Dombrowski
Justin Dombrowski is founder of Historiocity Tech, a technology consultancy for companies developing, understanding, or implementing emerging technology, especially in the intersection of FinTech, IoT, and mobile. He is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University specializing in economic history and has lectured on the history of financial markets at the Italian and French embassies, along with numerous conferences. He also holds a B.S. in physics from the University of Michigan and worked on the LIGO Project. Justin lives in New York.
Beyond bitcoin and the blockchain to booming business
Widespread blockchain adoption requires understanding between developers and domain experts.
Editor’s note: this post is part of our investigation into the future of money. The full video compilation from our first event, Bitcoin & the Blockchain, is now available.
The vision for bitcoin and the blockchain is unabashedly optimistic, though already it is being realized. More and more technologists, venture capitalists, financial institutions, and even regulators are seeing its long-term potential to transform industries, from financial services to data management to the Internet of Things. In the medium term, there remain hurdles to overcome before blockchain technology can offer sufficiently compelling solutions for the complex financial and technological world we live in, but there is progress to date — and it’s promising.
Blockchain-based remittance vehicles offered by Coins.ph, BitPagos, and BitPesa, though early stage, aim to take a chunk of the $450 billion remittance industry by offering speedier, more efficient, and cheaper alternatives to traditional solutions. BitPay offers bitcoin/fiat payment processing for merchants as well as bank integration. Increasingly, private investors are diversifying their portfolios by purchasing bitcoin alongside traditional assets. Most recently, Coinbase even received funding from a group of blue-chip investors, including the New York Stock Exchange, and launched its own exchange, signaling both greater acceptance by the financial services industry as well as confidence in its future value. Ripple Labs has taken a very different approach with its protocol, permitting the decentralized transmission of practically any currency type — cryptographic or fiat — like an SMTP for money, and circumventing traditional payment networks. And to this end, it’s already inked agreements with Cross River Bank (New Jersey), CBW Bank (Kansas), and Fidor Bank (Germany), with more on the horizon. Read more…