'Open, Fair & Accessible' is How The Founder of Blockchain Sees the Future of World Finance Nicolas Cary's company Blockchain roped in Richard Branson as among its first investors. In 2017, Google Ventures came on board as investors
By Aashika Jain •
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"Our vision was about an open, fair and accessible financial future and thus came Blockchain," says Nicolas Cary, the owner of popular company Blockchain that uses the blockchain technology to build solutions.
With Blockchain, Cary wished to wrap the whole planet in a capability for regular people to send receive secure exchange and acquire new digital assets. This vision meant experimenting with a new technology that would be superior to thousands of years of the world using different financial tools fabrics and different forms of money.
In 2014, as CEO of Blockchain, Cary led the biggest round of venture capital financing in the digital currency sector at that time, closing $30.5 million from investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners and Richard Branson. In 2017, Cary helped raise another $40 million from investors including Google Ventures.
In the digital age, the real challenge remains how digital tools and money are built and Cary wants to bring billions of people into the economic fabric of internet. Cary believes that blockchain technology can improve society through global, transparent digital payments and IoT applications.
"It's just the beginning of things because not only billions of people are currently excluded from the financial services sector. We also have the ability to bring in the billions of machines online. In next five or ten years, people will be making economic transactions with each other. We anticipate machines well too," Cary told Entrepreneur India.
Cary who started his career in India as a professor ten years ago believes that for money to be useful, all consumers need is the Internet. "It should be digital. It should be counterfeit proof. It should be fungible meaning one-piece looks like another. It should be easily visible so it can be sent in denominations of a currency," says Cary.
Why Blockchain
Blockchain is a giant spread sheet in the cloud they keeps tracking of who owns what. It is an incredibly interesting innovation because now we have a computer system, which no central authority can govern and that's important because it allows us to have completely redundant distribution of a state of existence for a data base says Cary.
With blockchain we are able to pioneer really interesting ideas believes Cary. One of those is digital currencies and we have seen projects like bitcoin are really pushing the envelope forward. They are actually now a thousands of new ones coming to market. Cary thinks that we are now going to see central banks consider and looking forward to using blockchain technology to issue sovereign digital currency.
While adoption of technology may take time, Cary is confident central banks' concerns will be around how more economic velocity is built and if we can do that using digital currency.
What's interesting about blockchain technology is, one, it is a very global phenomenon. It is not isolated to Silicon Valley. "There are amazing entrepreneurs working on this technology I every single market I have travelled to, what I want to address is really at the heart of concern, which is always about the consumer protection," Cary says.
Cary believes blockchain can be used as a technology in a way that protects consumer from inherent risks. In India, rules for financial service institutions should just be applied to digital currency exchange.
"If you want to buy or trade any type of asset, we need to know who you are. Get linked to your bank account, we need to have your identity and they're going to be money laundering rules that are applied in government transaction. That's going to be applied to the digital currencies exchanges as well," Cary says.
By 2024, there will be hundreds of millions of young adults in India who are going to need access to financial products that are mobile, digital to give them the opportunity of send, receive, secure and exchange value invest safe. Cary thinks if the government creates a regular trade frame, there are braces digital capabilities and technologies, applies consumer protection rules then Blockchain can do really significant work here.
Every Company is a Start up Till it is Out of Business
Cary who has also co-founded a non-profit organisation called skysthelimit.org thinks if you don't have an entrepreneurial mind-set to reinvent your business constantly, your business will stagnate and ultimately you will fail.
"We are always asked whether you still a start-up. To me every company is a start-up until they have not gone out of business. To me cultivating an entrepreneurial spirit across culture and the way we think about decisions is critical to our long-term success," Cary says.
An avid fan of Richard Branson who believes in creating opportunities, Cary says the blockchain technology is going to fundamentally help in shape and build incredible opportunities for entrepreneurs in India the same way it going to inspire generations of entrepreneur around the world, build e-commerce platform, social media sites.
Cary believes there are limitless possibilities with blockchain as a technology and the government's contribution in creating a framework for innovation in this industry is going to be very successful.
