AllianceBlock Becomes A Founding Innovation Platform Partner for Plug and Play’s Crypto and Digital Assets Vertical
Last month, AllianceBlock attended the Plug and Play Summer Summit in Silicon Valley. Our Ecosystem and Business Development lead, Ferdinand Scheiff, shares insights from the summit.
Last month, the AllianceBlock team visited the Plug and Play Summer Summit held at the Plug and Play Headquarters in Sunnyvale, California. Our Co-Founder and CEO, Rachid Ajaja, alongside Joshua Forster and Ferdinand Scheiff from our Business Development and Ecosystem team, interacted with thought leaders and like-minded innovators, discussing Web3.0’s potential and the current state of the Crypto market.
The summit featured various events and expos in different Plug and Play verticals, with our team focused on the Fintech vertical, rethinking innovation in financial services.
At the summit, Plug and Play introduced AllianceBlock as one of the Anchor Founding Members of its newly established Cryptocurrency/Digital Assets innovation platform. The new vertical will focus on decentralized technologies and connect established corporates with startups’ innovative thinking and offerings utilizing Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT).
Rachid introduced AllianceBlock to a packed room of financial institutions, corporate leaders, and startups, which laid the foundation for many conversations throughout the remainder of the summit.
AllianceBlock’s Co-Founder and CEO also provided expertise at a Crypto Workshop directed at executives and business leaders. The Crypto Workshop included a panel discussion with Rachid Ajaja and Douglas Borthwick, Chief Business Officer at INX. The workshop was focused on regulation and compliance in the DeFi space.
Rachid and Douglas discussed the industry’s current challenges, such as the lack of regulation and the need for regulatory guidelines in crypto and technological improvements to support organizations in their compliance management. There was also an emphasis on compliance as the final piece of the puzzle for the institutional adoption of cryptocurrencies.
“Financial institutions in Switzerland want to utilize DeFi technology and offer staking, yield products, and liquidity mining to their clients. However, they face issues with compliance & regulation, specifically for decentralized exchanges and yield protocols. KYC/AML is critical, as institutions need to know who is providing liquidity.” — Rachid Ajaja
Rachid highlighted the need for a regulatory framework for traditional financial institutions (TradFi) to adopt and participate in DeFi technology.
Key takeaways from the summit
Large corporations and startups are cooperating to leverage blockchain technology
Seeing the exchange between large corporations and newly established startups was inspiring. The willingness to overcome differences in culture, structure, and operations for the common goal of implementing and scaling the latest technologies created an atmosphere of innovation and free-thinking.
The interest in DLT was ever-present across all verticals, not just fintech. Corporates can apply the technology to supply chain management, the energy or healthcare sectors, and decentralized finance. At the conference, we discussed multiple topics, including stablecoins, tokenization use cases, and engaged in several discussions about the opportunities DeFi can bring to TradFi.
The current market conditions haven’t deterred corporations from adopting blockchain technology
In the various discussions on and off stage, participants couldn’t ignore the current state of the crypto market. Weathered industry veterans referred to the 2018 bear market and called for patience and an absolute emphasis on developing during this market, which AllianceBlock is committed to doing.
In addition, current macroeconomic factors such as rising inflation and fears of economic recession leading to stagflation, the violent Russian incursion into Ukraine, as well as the de-pegging of UST, fears of liquidation of Celcius, and the recent Harmony Bridge hack were named as leading factors in the recent crypto market retraction. It’s also more noticeable than ever that the crypto market is more closely correlated to the Nasdaq, further highlighting the fact that macro factors’ impact the market.
Although the market has negatively impacted retail investors, the companies attending the summit didn’t decide to halt any DLT projects, and the sentiment was positive. The confidence in decentralized technologies was unshaken by the market conditions. Traditional mainstream companies continue to investigate and adopt the fundamental technologies that enable DeFi, despite current market conditions— a good indicator that blockchain and DeFi are here to stay.
Various engagements of DLT companies across multiple verticals further prove corporates’ continued confidence in DLT. Chainlink continues to extend its node operator network with Swisscom and Deutsche Telekom. Several Formula 1 teams have partnered with blockchain companies like Binance, FTX, Velas, and Tezos to create NFT fan experiences and explore metaverse activations. More and more financial institutions are leveraging decentralized technologies for asset tokenization to enhance loyalty programs and offer new investment solutions for their customers.
Interestingly, blockchain technology is crossing more and more into mainstream media, becoming a crucial element of business development and marketing strategies. For example, Binance recently announced a partnership with Cristiano Ronaldo, the world’s most-followed person on social media, to expand Web 3.0 knowledge and reduce barriers to entering the NFT market.
VeChain recently announced they would become the UFC’s first-ever Official Layer 1 Blockchain Partner. FIFA unveiled Crypto.com as an official partner of the Qatar 2022 football World Cup, anticipated to be the most-watched sporting event of 2022.
Blockchain technology is a tool that creates efficiencies and presents new business opportunities
Corporations increasingly see blockchain technology as a tool to make existing processes more efficient and present new business opportunities. The initial approach towards blockchain technology was to leverage the market hype without understanding how the technology could provide real-world utility. Companies that wanted to be seen as innovative announced that they were implementing blockchain technology into their business without going into specific details. This negatively impacted the blockchain industry, as controversies on fraudulent projects were widely reported and implementations of the tech weren’t significant enough to merit adoption.
Since then, we’ve seen blockchain technology has evolved from something cool and hip to an efficient and strategic business growth tool that corporates see as a fundamental pillar of their strategy, particularly TradFi strategies. Blockchain technology and smart contracts, in particular, can be set to automate payment and settlement processes in finance, improve supply chain transparency in logistics, and revolutionize data ownership. Adopting blockchain technology and its solutions provides corporations a competitive advantage. Building knowledge and understanding in using these technologies allows them to offer more innovative solutions and services, utilizing the efficiencies of DLT to innovate faster.
The AllianceBlock team thanks Plug and Play for three incredible days of thought-provoking conversations and the opportunity to showcase our capabilities to their ecosystem. We look forward to shaping and engaging the Plug and Play Cryptocurrency/Digital Asset innovation platform. The resulting conversations with corporates and startups will be invaluable to our mission to build an end-to-end DeFi infrastructure to accelerate business growth and provide a compliant gateway for TradFi into DeFi.
About AllianceBlock
AllianceBlock is bridging the gap between decentralized and traditional finance by remedying issues that exist in both spheres and linking them more closely together. They see the future of finance as an integrated system in which the best of both worlds can work together to increase capital flows and technological innovation.
By bridging traditional finance with compliant, data-driven access to new decentralized markets, DeFi projects, and ecosystem-scaling tools such as funding and interoperability, they are building a next-generation financial infrastructure that aims to provide regulated financial entities around the world with the tools they need to seamlessly access the DeFi space.
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