Scott Farrell, Partner at King & Wood Mallesons, said, “This market is moving much faster than other markets I’ve worked in: the ability to translate the technology’s uniqueness is fantastic.”

In this fast-moving environment, products can come and go – a challenge for investors. “It’s evolving rapidly,” said Andrew Gee at Macquarie. “Products can be gone within six weeks from a strong start.”

In the technology world, failing fast is a strategy in itself, of course. Fred Schebesta, Co-Founder of Finder, explained this Darwinian approach: “We need to adapt to service for the future – our way of adapting is to go live, maybe too fast but it makes us good at adapting.”

Such is the speed of change that, in some countries, there is a chance that more decentralised Web 3 tech may leapfrog the Web 2 stage that most of us know today. This would resemble the way that M-Pesa started enabling payments through mobile phones in Africa back in 2007, well before mobile banking was introduced, according to Ronit Ghose, Citibank’s Global Head of Banking, Fintech & Digital Assets.

Walking the talk

A great barometer of change is language: when things change so fast, the terminology has to change to keep up. Speakers at Blockchain Week talked of being forward-leaning, forward-looking, and, channelling Sheryl Sandberg, leaning in. Before, there was DeFi. Now there’s GameFi and MetaFi as well. Web 3 appears in every other sentence and everyone is launching a metaverse.

It’s easy to be beguiled by the frenetic pace of change and all these buzzwords. But I believe it’s vital to stay focused on the purpose of innovation. What does it achieve? What improvements does it offer to companies or individuals over what we have today?

Identifying which innovations are going to stick around and make a real difference is therefore centrally important, especially for enterprises. We heard that this is exactly what many of the biggest and most forward-looking companies are doing.

In the Monday banking and payments panel session, JP Morgan’s Bianca Bates explained that the global bank is investing in new decentralised tech as a way to explore it and develop use cases. Anthony Jones, Head of Innovation & Fintech at Visa AU, said Visa’s approach is to create a bridge between traditional, centralised finance (CeFi) and decentralised finance (DeFi) so their existing customers can access digital assets. Sophie Gilder, Managing Director of Blockchain & Digital Assets at Commonwealth Bank, said CBA has launched a facility within its banking app for customers to buy and sell 10 cryptocurrencies. It’s a trial programme to test the waters, but the biggest issue so far has been complaints from those not included in the trial pilot.

These big financial institutions’ engagement strategies reveal a different mindset to the fail-fast-move-on ethos of more agile developers and entrepreneurs. There’s a good reason for that: financial institutions are highly regulated companies with a wide range of fiduciary responsibilities to their customers and shareholders.

It's not just that the banks want to avoid paying fines, or even bad press. They depend on the trust placed in them by depositors and regulators in order to exist. I know that trust is a very loaded term in the digital asset world, where the trustlessness and permissionlessness of decentralised exchanges and wallets are seen by many as a matter of principle.

But the truth is that, if blockchain is going to go mainstream as the basis for assets or financial infrastructure, then it is going to have to gain the trust of companies and consumers.

Riding the rails

ASX’s focus is on helping financial institutions and companies make the most of blockchain technology through Synfini, our DLT as a Service offering. This allows our clients to capture the benefits of DLT in connecting fragmented data and providing a single source of truth for processes involving multiple parties. If our clients trust ASX’s solution – as many participants trust our securities market – then they don’t need to spend significant time and money on building their own blockchain environment.

In this respect, enterprises aren’t so different from individuals. Most don’t need or want to know about decentralised ledgers, modes of consensus or block mining protocols. They just want to understand the possibilities for business improvement, new product development or even to experience what it’s like to buy and hold crypto and NFTs.

So I think a key measure of success across blockchain applications will be when people don’t even know that the functionality they’re using relies on DLT in the background. As Monoova CEO Christian Wigstrom put it at Blockchain Week: “The single largest change is where it won’t be exceptional that we do stuff via blockchain.” Wigstrom says that by this stage, customers will be looking for the service, not the tech. “People will come to us saying, ‘why can I not do this?’ rather than ‘I should look into blockchain’.”

Businesses that want to develop innovative services that solve problems and create value are the natural users of Synfini – the blockchain technology it provides is a means to those ends, not the end itself.

We also believe that at ASX, where investor protection is built into the DNA of the organisation, Synfini makes an attractive platform for financial institutions in particular. The offerings they build on it will have positive real-world impacts, but will also require them to adhere to high standards of transparency and offer recourse for errors under some circumstances. Plus, financial institutions are already very familiar with the open-banking concept of APIs and most are already part of the ASX ecosystem, so using DAML in Synfini should be a familiar process for them.

The evolution of blockchain is accelerating, for sure, and it’s critical for all enterprises to keep pace. But none of that changes the importance of a trusted technology partner when you are not aiming to fail – fast or slow – but rather to build better products and services that will stand the test of time.