Visions of Blockchain Magazine S01E02 | Page 55

Megaphone Corporate Status Quo The blockchain ecosystem is already dominated by traditional corpora- tes, financial institutions and fin- tech startups seeking to leverage the technology to cut operating costs, reap profits and build new monopo- listic empires. A consortium of over 80 of the lar- gest banking and financial institu- tions have joined forces to build a private financial blockchain plat- form entirely under their control. Fortune 500 companies are for- ming an enterprise alliance to leve- rage Ethereum to pursue their own fiduciary duty to maximize profits for shareholders. Central banks in China, Russia, Canada, Denmark, England and Singapore are already exploring or developing ways to is- sue sovereign cryptocurrency while maintaining full control . Having started the Sydney Ethereum meetup in 2014, I’ve witnessed firsthand the dramatic demographic shift from anarchist developers to corporate executives wearing suits. Ethe- reum meetups are rapidly devolving into inve- stor clubs for speculators and recruiting pools for corporate executives. I n the information era of today, the primary business models of corporations essentially boil down to a simple three step process: 1. Capture, monopolize and privatize data 2. Create artificial scarcity by restricting access 3. Repackage and sell that data in various ways