This Week in Fintech ending 9 July 2021
This week our experts brought you the following insights based on their experience as investors, entrepreneurs & executives.
Monday Ilias Hatzis our Greece-based crypto entrepreneur (Founder & CEO at Kryptonio a “keyless” non-custodial bitcoin and cryptocurrency wallet, that lets users manage bitcoin and crypto, without private keys or passwords and Weekly Columnist at Daily Fintech) @iliashatzis wrote Ethereum is on track to overtake bitcoin’s market cap
Bitcoin is the most popular crypto protocol, and the standard for the entire crypto economy. In 2021, the competition between bitcoin and ethereum has intensified, as the struggle for cryptocurrency domination heats up.
Editor note:Ilias looks at the leading indicator of active addresses.
Bernard Lunn, CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy wrote:10 reasons El Salvador President made the right call on Bitcoin at the right time
Nayib Bukele is the telegenic young (born 1981) 46th President of El Salvador who came to office on 1 June 2019 and announced the stunning move to make Bitcoin legal tender on 25 June 2021 (to take effect on 7 September).
Before noting 10 reasons why he made the right call on Bitcoin at the right time, a small quibble. Bitcoin is already legal tender in Switzerland (where like El Salvador, its use is optional). Point 7 notes why El Salvador’s decision is more important than Switzerland’s move which dates back to the 1930’s and which Daily Fintech told you about in 2015.
Editor note: read this to understand the narrative of the next Bitcoin bull market
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Tuesday Bernard Lunn, CEO of Daily Fintech and author of The Blockchain Economy wrote: 4 part series on Lightning Network Part 1: First the Rest then the West.
Lightning Network matters; if Bitcoin is ever going to become money it needs massive scalability that will enable totally new types of transaction such as micropayments, real time payments and mobile money for the unbanked. Linear scaling is not enough. It must be the kind of non-linear scaling that powered the Internet – like 100x the 2,000 Transactions Per Second that Visa routinely handles. Those transactions also need to be super reliable, lightning fast (a few seconds max) and dirt cheap.
And programmable. And permissionless.
Wow, that is a super tough scope of work!
The main hope for this is Lightning Network, which is one example of an off-chain transaction processing system.
Editor note: Read this 4-parter if you are interested in the future of Bitcoin.
Wednesday Alan Scott Managing Director EMEA at 24 Exchange @Alan_SmartMoney wrote his weekly roundup of Stablecoin news.
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Thursday
Rintu Patnaik, an Insurtech expert based in India, wrote: From Damage Assessment to Driver Assistance, Computer Vision Tech Pervades
In a historic 2012 ImageNet competition, a team led by Geoff Hinton debuted a new network architecture whose performance outshone all previous efforts at computer-based image recognition. With that, the era of deep learning was born, with computer vision as its original use case. Since then, computer vision capabilities have raced ahead.
In layman terms, computer vision (CV) is the automation of human sight. The ability to automate sight opens up market opportunities across the economy, including insurance which relies on visual assessment of assets: to price and underwrite policies or to determine degree of damage after an accident. Computers are primed to see via exposure to newer objects and closed loop feedback on previously identified objects. For CV to be successful, a computer must be exposed to many images and videos, analyze them and receive feedback on analyses. Carriers benefit from precise underwriting, reduced need for adjusters to physically inspect properties, reduced human error and fraud, and expedited submissions and claims.
Editor note: It will be interesting to see how driver assistance/self driving solutions get used to reduce auto insurance. Mobileye/Intel will be worth watching.
Christian Dreyer @x3er, the Swiss based CFA who focusses on how XBRL changes our world wrote his weekly roundup of XBRL news.
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Friday Howard Tolman, a well-known banker, technologist and entrepreneur in London, wrote his weekly roundup of Alt Lending news.
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