Friedman added that one of the first blockchain projects Nasdaq implemented was with the government of Estonia. “We worked with the government and they basically digitized their entire economy. They put their entire economy into a digital format, including the I.D.s for all of their citizens, and so what they allowed us to do was latch into that system to create a proxy voting capability through the blockchain because of the fact that they had a perfect record of ownership of securities through their I.D. system, which then allowed us to be able to use that system to be able to show whether or not someone had voted for that proxy or not,” she said. “Now we are working with South Africa to do it, so we’re starting to use it in larger and larger economies because of the fact that the digitization of economies is occurring all over the world.”
Friedman added Nasdaq is also working with organizations to use blockchain on the settlement of securities. “We’re working with a lot of companies where its either bilaterial, or a small ecosystem. It’s unregulated so you don’t have to deal with managing the regulatory side of it, but there’s a lot of inefficiency,” Friedman said. “That’s a great way to use and prove out the blockchain that shows its value, and you can bring it into the larger markets over time.”
Panelist Lex Sokolin, director of fintech strategy for Autonomous Research, added blockchain is not just a system for value transfers; it can be used to bring truth and prevent forgery with any object that has attributes of scarcity.
“You can do the same thing for any financial asset, for swords in a video game. You can do the same thing for virtual reality in houses, you can do the same thing for every single tree in a forest that now has it’s own identity … and now all of a sudden you’ve tokenized forests.”
“It’s very difficult to say here’s the end point,” he continued. “But the biggest mistake we can make today is to say, shut it down, it’s a fraud, it’s a scam, and that comes from a severe misunderstanding of what is actually happening in the world.”