The Chinese government is leading the way in this and recently indicated that it has accelerated the rollout due to corona. The economic superpower has already conducted dozens of experiments with its Digital Currency Electronic Payment (DCEP) among citizens and companies. This is almost ready for a global rollout. The European Central Bank will make a clear decision about the Digital Euro in January 2021.
It will be interesting to see which countries will come up with this. And whether the idea of a ' synthetic hegemonic currency ' (a global digital currency) also has a chance of success.
bitcoin money smartphone
Blockchain technology currently has the greatest impact on the financial industry. This is shown by various studies . In addition to the previously discussed CBCDs, I previously wrote about Decentralized Finance (DeFi). This is a rapidly emerging trend that is expected to develop much faster in the coming year. These alternative forms of financing all fit nicely into the fintechization of our society. A large number of fintech companies are currently responding to this.
In the coming year, strong growth is also expected for tokenization , the digital storage of assets on the blockchain. The top 250 fintech companies have already raised $50 billion in brazil telegram data 30 million investments in the past year. More and more companies, including PayPal , are launching crazy services, built with blockchain technology.
Trend 4. Zero knowledge required
Privacy is and remains a hot topic, especially because of all the scandals surrounding stolen or misused data, which keep making the news. The concerns about privacy of data on the blockchain unfortunately slow down many projects. An important trend of 2021 is therefore the ' Zero Knowledge Proof ' (ZKP). This technique was already developed in 1980 at MIT. But thanks to blockchain it is really widely used to verify confidential data, without the confidential data being shown. An example is checking whether you have enough money in your bank account to follow a course, without seeing the balance.
As a Dutch bank, ING has already taken major steps, for example to put mortgage applications on the blockchain and to automatically grant or reject an application by means of ZKPs, as a kind of notary. All kinds of solutions are rapidly coming onto the market to widely deploy ZKPs, such as Nightfall from EY and the Baseline Protocol from Ethereum.
The big challenge remains the complexity of the developments. Complex or not, it will become an important trend in the coming year with the ever-increasing demand for privacy.
