11/2/2022

Blockchain Sector Update - 11/01/22

By: Radhika Aggarwal, Jeongsik Park, and Lalitha Gurajada

Blockchain in e-commerce (cross-border payments): Blockchain technology can be advantageous in the e-commerce sector in many ways like transparency, security, payment efficiency and so on. It is safe to say that blockchain has the potential to completely transform how consumers can globally exchange value, transfer ownership of goods, verify transactions and pay for services. One of the main components in e-commerce is to manage cross-border payments yet current systems pose a lot of problems due to the high volume of transactions. Cross-border payments have especially grown post pandemic in the emerging markets like Africa, Latin America and Asia and studies show that nearly 75% of the transactions end up not getting their desired currencies. With the emergence of Blockchain in e-commerce, cross-border payments can be processed at higher speed and efficiency. Because, blockchain is not limited by country boundaries and can interconnect banks over a single network. This will allow speedy and economic transactions as there’s no bank involvement and is available 24/7 irrespective of timezone. While this could disrupt traditional retail payments, blockchain will foster limitless innovation in cross-border payments allowing better transparency and greater trust in the retailer. Developments in Swiss Legislations about Blockchain: With the above-mentioned benefits of blockchain in areas like e-commerce and trade financing, among other industries, blockchain is gaining a lot of attention across the globe. A lot of countries are making advances in the blockchain sector which also impact the development of the blockchain sector in the United States. Switzerland, being one of the most advanced countries in the field of fintech, was one of the early adopters of blockchain technology. A lot of factors have contributed to the successful adoption of blockchain in Switzerland, especially its innovation-friendly framework conditions and legal certainty about the field. The country has kept its legal environment up-to-date with the developments in the blockchain industry and, more particularly, cryptocurrency. The latest blockchain legislation further strengthens the legal certainty for blockchain applications in the fintech sector. It sets down a clear legal basis for the issuance and transfer of rights on a distributed ledger. It also protects customers in insolvency by providing the segregation of digital assets in the event of bankruptcy. In addition to that, it introduces the DLT Trading Facility as a new authorization category for the multilateral trading of securities issued on a distributed ledger in a regulated environment. You can read more about the topic here: https://fintechnews.sg/65245/sponsoredpost/switzerland-plays-a-pioneering-role-in-blockchain-regulation/ Blockchain in the Industry: NFTs on Twitter: Blockchain can be used in many fields such as NFT, CBDC, DeFi, Web3.0, SCM, etc. Among them, NFT is one of the fields receiving the most attention from the public. In addition, NFT is one of the most asked areas of how it will be used in industry. So, is the NFT currently answering this question? Let's take a look at how NFTs and blockchains are being used in industry by twitter. Recently on Twitter, the trend of setting NFTs as profile pictures has spread around cryptocurrency followers. Twitter became a space where users collect NFTs and show off their NFTs. Twitter decided to provide a new service thanks to this current trend and the increase in the frequency of use of NFT hashtags. Because of the nature of NFTs as limited resources, they could stimulate human possessiveness, which raised the value of NFTs. However, in the existing Twitter method, there was no way for people to check whether NFTs were really owned by them or only images were taken. Now, after linking the user's Twitter account with the user's crypto wallet account such as Coinbase, one of the NFTs in possession can be set as the Twitter profile picture, which appears in a hexagonal shape instead of a conventional circle shape. In other words, it is possible to know if the user actually owns the NFT. Furthermore, if you look at companies such as Adobe, Reddit, and Meta, NFTs are establishing a new economic system and creating new revenue opportunities. With adobe's content credential feature, creators directly issue NFTs, buyers trade and communicate through Reddit, meta, etc., and users brag about it through Twitter. By entering the NFT market of big tech companies, the existing problems of accessibility and popularization were solved. Because they already have a lot of users and they know how to make it easy for regular users to publish and trade NFTs. As such, tech companies are answering the question of how NFT will be utilized. Companies see NFTs as a means of generating new revenues and as a technology that will play a key role in the meta verse. It is expected how other big tech companies such as apple and microsoft will answer these questions.