The people in the financial industry who have invested in blockchain development are going to reap a few benefits in the coming years. As more and more users adapt to this new economy, the effects will be larger and more significant. People today want to know all the details of how they have to pay, what they have to pay, and all about the process behind their financial transfers.
It is no more than a black box concept now. More than 77 per cent of the industries in the financial services sector are going to try to adapt to blockchain technology by 2021, according to a report published by PWC. Among the 77 percentage, one-third are banks who are willing to take the blockchain road ahead.
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Evolution of the Blockchain Technology
Blockchain technology involves cryptography. So, this enables the creation of a robust system which facilitates the copying of digital data and its distribution among different nodes. It also helps in the detection of any malfunction or modification in hash functions due to its properties. In the fintech industry, blockchain technology intends to provide a seamless banking experience. It helps in the reduction of costs and cures the inefficiencies like clearing settlements. Blockchain will also help to reduce fraud and cyber-attacks. It facilitates the sharing and transfer of financial information through a decentralized network by reducing the amount of data and other operations.
Leading Global Fintech Start-ups and Unicorns using Blockchain
Start-ups in the fintech sector now have funding, and the funding rose to 41 per cent in 2017 and had crossed the mark of $40 billion. Let us have a look at some global fintech start-ups who have considered adopting blockchain technology and are reaping its benefits: –
1) Axoni
Founders: CEO Greg Schvey and CTO Jeff Schvey.
It is based in New York and has received funding from Goldman Sachs, J.P Morgan, and others worth $59 Million. It has partnered with the world’s biggest banks and intermediaries and provide services that involve the parties to monitor and view payments, transactions, calculations on other information on a real-time basis in order to make everything more efficient.
2) Bit fury
Co-founder & CEO: Valery Vavilov
It is based in Amsterdam and has received funding worth 150 million from Korelya Capital, Macquarie Capital, Dentsu & others. It has launched its own Blockchain and software and works for the enforcement of U.S. laws to monitor the fraud activities related to bitcoins.
3) Circle
Co-founder & CEO: Jeremy Allaire
It is based in Boston and has received funding worth $246 million from Bitmain, Breyer Capital, IDG Capital, Goldman Sachs, and many more investors. It offers services for trading facilities and payments dealing with cryptocurrencies.
4) Coinbase
Co-founder & CEO: Brian Armstrong
It is based in San Francisco. It has received funding worth $525 million from Andreessen Horowitz, YC Continuity, Tiger Global Management and many more. It provides a cryptocurrency-based trading platform for both professional and institutional forms.
5) Gemini
Co-founder & CEO: Tyler Winklevoss, 37, a former Olympic rower
It based in New York and has received funding from Winklevoss Capital Management which is wholly owned by Tyler and Cameron. It has launched the virtual commodities association to encourage self-regulation and cryptocurrency.
6) Ripple
Co-founders: Jed McCaleb, Chris Larsen and Arthur Britto
Its initial release was in 2012. It is a real-time payment settlement system which is based in San Francisco. It received a funding of $94 million from IDG Capital, InnoVentures, SBI Investment, Santander and many more. It is a network for global settlements built using blockchain technology. It is built with an aim to be used as a substitute to the interbank messaging platform, SWIFT which is increasingly being used at present.
7) Symbiont
Co-founders: Mark Smith, Adam Krellenstein, Evan Wagner, Robby Dermody
It is based in New York and was founded in 2015. It has developed blockchain-based products which manage financial aspects of mortgages, syndicated loans, and private equities through decentralized ledgers.
8) Bit pay
CEO: Stephen Pair
It was founded in 2011. It provides bitcoin payment services and is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, United States.
9) Request Network
CTO & Co-Founder: Etienne Tatur
It is a network that is decentralized and processes payment requests and acts as a bridge between physical and digital payments. It operates in Asia-Pacific (APAC), Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), Southeast Asia, and was founded in 2017.
10) Stellar
Founder: Jed McCaleb, Joyce Kim
The initial release was in 2014. It is an opensource digital currency transfer platform and facilitates transactions in any currency denominations. It received seed funding of $3 million from Stripe.
11) Veem
Founders: Aldo Carrascos and Marwan Forzley
It is based in San Francisco and was founded in 2014. It belongs to the payment services industry and provides a global platform for payments using SWIFT and cryptocurrency. It received funding worth $12.5 million in 2015 through Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, Recruit Venture Partners and existing seed investors Pantera Capital, Digital Currency Group, and FS Venture Capital LLC.
12) We.Trade
It is based in Dublin, United Kingdom. It was founded in 2017. It is a joint venture and is owned by fifteen banks in Europe. It is a blockchain-based trading platform which provides an efficient functioning and secure environment for commercial clients and banks.
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Blockchain is tremendously transforming the face of the fintech sector. The ways in which this is happening involve faster and easily tracked transactions, detection of fraud, automated handling of a huge volume of financial transactions, and much more. The most prominent impact areas of integrating blockchain technologies to the fintech sector include third party elimination, smart contracts, verification, fraud detection, and the overall processes of financial transactions. It has enabled organizations to reduce the paperwork needed usually for legal purposes and has tried to remove the middlemen, which eventually has made everything more transparent than before.
The potential of Blockchain is improving on a huge scale day by day, and in today’s times, it has become a mandate to remain informed of the recent innovations and developments in the industry to have a competitive edge in the market; blockchain adaptation and implementation will see tremendous growth in the coming years.
