Cryptocurrencies, Digital assets, Tokens and Blockchain maturity is coming soon

By Kurt Seifried, Chief Blockchain Officer, CS

Tautology - a statement that is true by necessity or by virtue of its logical form.

Blockchains are going to rapidly gain maturity because people are using blockchains, because they are rapidly gaining maturity. Essentially we’re at the inflection point of the S curve of adoption here. Let’s talk about Central Bank Digital Currencies (CBDC), I think we can all agree that countries officially adopting blockchain technology for their currencies would be the ultimate proof they have arrived. Currently several dozen countries are looking at CBDC’s with several in various stages of development. Interesting the majority of countries are still opposed to actually launching a CBDC… until they have to, to quote the Bank of Canada:

The Bank currently has no plans to launch a CBDC. Rather, the Bank will build the capacity to issue a general purpose, cash-like CBDC should the need to implement one arise. Because it will take several years to build this capacity, the Bank cannot wait until the need is evident before launching preparatory work. Preparing in advance is critical. At the same time, the Bank is preparing for a range of other possible changes to money and payments in Canada as innovation continues. [1]

In other words it’s a classic “we’re not going to do it, until we have to, but we’re going to prepare, since it looks like we will have to do it soon because of market forces, or because someone else might do it and we don’t want to be stuck with theirs.”

Essentially we’re entering a Mexican standoff style situation, but with the added bonus of having a LOT of organizations that do actually want to pull the trigger first and legitimately have the capability to, for example Libra. As such it’s pretty clear that we need maturity in the space because whether we like it or not we’re going to be getting CBDC’s soon (my expectation is 1-5 years for a few countries followed globally by 5-10 years, some countries will drag their feet).

[1] https://www.bankofcanada.ca/2020/02/contingency-planning-central-bank-digital-currency/