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What are the blockchain applications from the assets perspective? Can you share some particular cases?

Blockchain is a register that can hold the transactions on any kind of asset: monetary assets, financial instruments, real estate, physical assets, intellectual property, identity, data etc. The Australian Stock Exchange plans for example to transition its clearing system onto a Blockchain. Nasdaq applies Blockchain for the issuance of private security deals. But it's not all about finance! IOTA is for example a protocol that implements the internet-of-things on a Blockchain. Hyperledger is a project from the Linux Foundation that aims to integrate global business transactions on Blockchain(s) in order to make the global supply chains more efficient.

What does the use of blockchain technology mean for organisations? How demanding from organisational culture and financial point of views is implication process?

Blockchain holds the potential to change fundamentally the economic and business logic. As the technology allows to write computer code around assets and by consequence allows business processes to be defined completely on a Blockchain platform, the current centralized organizational form of companies will be subject to a transition towards a distributed nature. This is a long term view, but with huge implications. The traditional management of a company could be replaced by codified interactions between global stakeholders that participate in a distributed decision making process. In the shorter term, the potential of Blockchain to organize business around a common source of truth, will eliminate the need for individual databases and the maintenance and reconciliation that comes with them.

Which country is the most advanced in using blockchain technology and what are the main outcomes?

Estonia is particularly advanced in the adoption of Blockchain. They have the technology operational in its national health, judicial and legislative systems and they work on implementations in personal medicine, data embassies and cyber security. Many other countries are moving into the space too! Sweden is putting its land registry on a Blockchain. Switzerland has its own crypto-valley where the town of Zug accept local tax payments in crypto-currencies. Dubai is actively looking into putting its entire government archive on a Blockchain. Slovenia has an extremely buoyant Blockchain community and the government moves towards becoming a Blockchain hub within Europe. Luxembourg too plays its role by setting up a public-private project called Infrachain that works on the implementation of a Blockchain infrastructure that is compliant with current legislation.

What is the link between chopped-up databases and Blockchain?

It is kind of intriguing how cash can be related to a database. If you take all the money bills in circulation in a country and you arrange them in numerical order according to their serial number and you take some adhesive tape and scotch them together to a very long sheet of paper, well, then you have a simple form of a database. As such, we can say that money bills are nothing else than a database cut in pieces, a chopped-up database. Now, Blockchain too, is a database. And that is where we can make kind of a connection between traditional money as a database and Blockchain that also holds the serial numbers, but then of crypto-currencies.