What to expect at Swift’s 'New Kids on the Blockchain'

Prominent names from the blockchain space are expected to come together this year at Sibos for the conference programme, ‘New Kids on the Blockchain’, to be held on October 12, 2015.

Sibos is the annual conference, exhibition and networking event organised by SWIFT for the financial industry. The Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) is a member-owned cooperative through which the financial world conducts its business operations with speed, certainty and confidence. It provides the proprietary communications platform, products and services that allow customers to connect and exchange financial information securely and reliably.

Last year, Innotribe dedicated an entire day to digital currencies and this year it will give a glimpse of what’s coming next – “What is after Bitcoin and blockchain? What are the advanced examples of distributed ledger use cases that may be relevant for financial services (such as smart contracts and distributed consensus protocols)?” It will also offer taxonomyfor distributed ledger technologies.

Speakers include Mark Buitenhek, Gobal Head of Transaction Services, ING; Oliver Bussmann, Group Chief Information Officer – Group Managing Director, UBS; Adam Ludwin, co-founder and CEO, Chain.com; Dan O’Prey, CMO, Digital Asset Holdings; Simon Taylor, VP Blockchain R+D, Barclays and many others.

"We (ie, the industry) are doing real time transactions today without distributed ledger technology”, Fabian Vandenreydt, head of markets management, Innotribe and the Swift Institute, told IBTimes."I think the distributed ledger technology can maybe compliment in certain areas. It's always dangerous to consider something as a panacea, a silver bullet. Because it never is actually."

Swift's Innotribe startup programme worked with some 370 young tech companies this year and considers Digital Asset-owned Hyperledger and Magnr, which is also offering enterprise blockchains, among its 60 finalists, IBTimes reported.