Serial Entrepreneur & Innovator, Future of digital assets and the next wave of Web 3, Kevin Hobbs, said he represented an industry that was about saving money, creating jobs in an emerging industry and technologies and which would hopefully be the future of finance.

Blockchain and crypto were “The obvious choice for the next generation of financial infrastructure.”

The media tended to portray crypto in terms of price and price only, with crypto crashes making for loud headlines, however people who stayed, invested and innovated in the industry would come out the other side and create higher highs and new innovation that was going to take new spaces for blockchain to the next level, Kevin said.

The current banking system used today was not built for the internet, where people did most of their banking today, and was fraught with vulnerability and fraud. A much more cost-effective system was needed.

“This system has led to enormous amounts of fraud - $20 billion in credit card fraud in the US alone, $60 billion in fraud in the banking system. This is expected to grow to over $400 billion in fraud worldwide,” he said.

The system was simply not built for today’s needs.

After the 2008 banking crisis, Bitcoin was launched, the first invention of technology that could underpin the financial system by providing digital scarcity and security and solving the double spend problem over the internet, paving the way for the future of banking

Bitcoin put all the solutions to banking problems together in an elegant framework to make digital money work without the need for a centralised party, using a proof of work mechanism.

Simply having a limited supply of an immutable asset was one of the main attributes of digital scarcity that was needed to underpin the financial system and was the foundation for sound money.

“Double spend” was the main problem. Bitcoin solved this with its proof of work consensus mechanism that prevented someone from attacking the network and making fraudulent transactions or spending the same money over and over, doing this without the need for a central party.

Bitcoin’s advantages included: it had a significantly less cost than the current system; it was scarce and could be easily counted; and could be valued in relation to how much someone owned relative to others. Accounts could not be frozen; it was fungible and portable. It could be used worldwide and used on the internet. Bitcoin’s blockchain had never been hacked, Kevin said.

Ethereum allowed rules to be added to money, speeding up transactions in real time. This had massive implications for sectors such as real estate, healthcare data, and financial transactions such as borrowing, lending and trading.

People could now own their own IP, content, and money online without trusting any third party and having full control and transparency.

On the downside, blockchain was not easy to use and people needed to remember their passwords, so technology was innovating in that regard.

“We are only at the tip of the iceberg as to what this technology can do, just like we were in the 2000s with the internet,” Kevin explained