Will blockchain revolutionise business?
Is the existing legal, economic and political framework ready for a digital transformation? In a digital world that relies on distributed ledgers, the way we regulate and maintain contracts, transactions, and the records that support them will have to change dramatically. There are many possible scenarios but a new article in the Harvard Business Review makes some suggestions about what is possible and the time that changes of this sort might take.
Like many other commentators the authors are cautious about just how long the road ahead might be. At XBRL International we agree: we’ve seen over the last 15 years that new technology takes a significant amount of time to alter regulated processes and people are especially cautious where finance is involved. Rightly so. The benefits of digitisation are simply too high to be ignored, but those benefits tend to accrue relatively slowly in these fields.
It has taken a long time, but business reporting is increasingly “digital first” all over the world. And that means standards such as XBRL. Perhaps we should expect similar pathways for adoption across complex, regulated ecosystems for blockchain infrastructure. Evolution, not revolution perhaps? Read the HBR article here.
