ICO Radio

BBFTA cofounder Dr Jane Thomason addressed this months meeting of Commonwealth Finance Ministers in Washington DC, presenting a paper on #Blockchain and Sovereign Debt.   She discussed the potential and benefits including cutting out 10 intermediaries and moving Sovereign Debt transactions from 5 days to 5 seconds.   Already the pilot has a secondary market created and boosted transparency and accessibility with a resultant reduction of risk - as smart contracts encode regulation to ensure rules are followed. SPECIAL OFFER: GET 50% DISCOUNT ON TICKETS FOR Digital Impact Week 2019 - London - https://digitalimpactweek2019.eventbrite.co.uk/?discount=bbfta50

Tom Mason is Koodoo's Technical Director, a tech entrepreneur, technical architect and business strategist. In 2008 Tom founded the software agency YouSoft, providing award-winning development services to best-in-class firms, including Porsche and Mercedes. Koodoo is a global equity crowdfunding platform connecting conscious investors and impact focused entrepreneurs, that unlocks the value of the blockchain to enable positive change for people and planet. Koodoo aims to democratise equity investment on a global level, enabling anyone to become a changemaker, whether you’re a startup from Shoreditch making ethical fashion accessible, a company from Kenya empowering off-grid citizens with a recognised location so they can open a bank account, an everyday investor in Holland who believes in the clean meat revolution looking to invest £20 into Cellular Agriculture, or a professional investor from South Africa looking to diversify their portfolio into impact investing. Title: “The blockchain to power frictionle

Frontier Insights are a weekly analysis of the latest advances and setbacks, use cases and major case studies and game changers in frontier tech. Published weekly to BBFTA.org members - here're this weeks highlights: How Blockchain technology is being used by vehicle manufacturers Central Banks digital currencies - Just a matter of time Generating income from exposure to Crypto SEC places a restraining order on one of the worlds’ biggest Cryptos Digital Assets in the property sector Governments to accept Digital Assets to pay citizens tax Get all the latest Frontier Insights at https://bbfta.org/insights

On the fringe of TeamBlockchain's September Blockchain Masterclass Barry interviews the speakers: Sean Kiernan. CEO and cofounder of DAG Global - the first UK bank created precisely to serve the blockchain and digital assets space - while all the other banks seem to be running in the opposite direction. Not only that this new breed of bank recognises the needs of SMEs in the UK k.and, seeing how underserved they are, aims to serve them too Dr Stephen Castell about developments in the world of blockchain over the last year - including changes in the way ICOs are run and the due diligence and legal processes that're developing around this and tokenisation. Not least the challenges of applying law conceived in a pre-digital age to decentralized systems and ecosystems. Who takes the blame when something goes wrong? Which leads me nicely into a conversation with... Henry Burrows. cofounder of Alaco Analytics who travels the world performing due diligence on crypto assets and the companies behind them - while rubbi

Kicking off season two Barry talks to Jonny Fry, CEO of TeamBlockchain and cofounder of the BBFTA.org about how the global landscape has changed so very fast. First the shift in the zeitgeist resulting from Libra coin, backed by Facebook and a consortium including Mastercard and Visa - plus the spread of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) - sometimes called "digital fiat currencies". Not least among them the People's Bank of China's announcement that they will lead the world with their own digital currency - set to rival, or surpass at a stroke, Libra. We touch on how a digital token could add 20% - 30% to the bottom line... and whether understanding and exploring this is part of director's fiduciary duties. Why BP created the VAKT - and then made it available to their competitors. How Louis Vuitton have done something similar. We explore how and why we now have negative rates - and what it all means.

Apple famously remade to music landscape - can this blockchain startup help to cut out the middlemen enable help musicians and artists to earn a living from their work? Nigel Rudlin is one of the cofounders of IndieOn.com - the blockchain startup that is seeking to remake the landscape for musicians and filmmakers.

This week, Barry E James speaks with Jonny Fry of Team Blockchain about Frontier Insights. Everyone is struggling to stay on top of the fast moving frontier of new technologies, especially Blockchain/DLT, AI and IoT. Every day there’s an incredible avalanche of stories published online, some fake and many more unreliable opinion or plain PR puff. There’s been nowhere to go to get concise, reliable, insightful and authoritative information. This is why Frontier Insights is essential - scanning the horizon for the latest significant developments, innovations and use cases. Barry and Jonny talk about what it is, what it covers and how to get hold of it:  bbfta.org/insights

'Blockchain Rookies' Explain Blockchain, Clearly, to Rookies (and others)   Saying that blockchain technology is the result of a paradigm shift while true is not much help in understanding it. In fact it just points to the difficulty for most people in understanding it.   People who can articulated advantages and explore its applications - especially with reference to a particular company or scenario - are still few and far between. Unfortunately much of the airwaves are filled with the noise of uninformed opinion.   So blockchain rookies come as something of a welcome relief, since, so the story goes - they're able to walk into a room full of the uninitiated and have them walk out with a clear understanding of at least the basics. What blockchain is and how it works.   So I challenged them to do just that!

We are now launching the first Association globally, the first network globally, for frontier Technologies But it's not just an Association for technologists at the Frontiers of AI, bots, robots, iot, autonomous vehicles, alternative reality, augmented reality, DLT and blockchain. Nor is it just for geeks in all the other emergent area a fintech and other sectors, or even those who are expert in more established Technologies. It goes wider than that because the Revolution we are now facing goes for wider than that. We know that technology can change our entire world, environment, because it happened already numerous times - and including in living memory with the internet and the World Wide Web This is accelerating is simply self-evident to anyone who's watching closely enough I think it's fair to say that last time the web took our Breath Away and caught us on the hop - we were victims the hype cycle, the.com boom and bust. I Irrational exuberance occasion by amazing technology followed by irrational disappo

London blockchain week has grown into one other major annual fixtures for the ecosystem.   Barry interviews founder Luis Carranza, about how came about, this year's highlights and a vision for the future, not to mention all the good reasons to join the community as part of this year's London blockchain week from February the 8th to the 14th   https://blockchainweek.com

Lee Birkett describes what just happened as a world first and for them something akin to landing a mission to Mars.   It's certainly hugely significant because this is the very thing that we were talking about with Mike Barrell the founder of the Security Tokens Realised conference: the tokenization onto the blockchain of regulated assets. In this case loan parts from properties, regulated by the FCA.   So how did one of the smaller regulated players, from the P2P market, get there first and break this new ground?   Well the fact is they were already ahead - because they were already able technologically and within the regulatory framework they worked so hard to construct to fractionalise traditional physical assets such as property and loans.   Adding blockchain technology and a token they've chosen to call BiPS is simply like throwing petrol on the fire.    As Mike Barrel put it last week this market is going to go quickly into the billions.   You can explore BiPS here: bips.Moneybrain.com   Yo

Tokens That’re Set to Take City by Storm? Security Tokens: Rising rapidly into the Billions? Security Token Offering (STO) investor Mike Barrell says that security tokens represent “a massive tidal wave of opportunity” for not just geeks but those in the city in 2019. Now he’s putting his money where his mouth is as the founder of next week's 'Security Tokens Realised' conference in the city, bringing together the leading minds in the field from the four corners of the planet. Inevitably ‘The New Normal’ He also believes it is inevitable that such token in their various forms, representing stocks, bonds and new instruments, will become a ‘New Normal’ for major banks, stock exchanges and the city – able to replace traditional equity,  bringing additional liquidity. “We're talking hundreds of millions which I think will quickly go to billions in terms of property portfolios and the tokenisation of existing funds for example.” If this sounds just like insupportable hype then think again. It's widely thought that

Following three decades as an entrepreneur and eight or so years specialising in equity crowdfunding, today’s guest Oscar Jofre explains why he firmly believes 2019 will be the year of the Security Token. Along the way, he discusses his own lightbulb moment about the democratisation of capital during a speech given by former vice chairman of NASDAQ David Weild. He talks about the paradigm shift crowdfunding brought about in opening-up investment to those previously excluded - and then putting this on the internet. And about the work his own platform, KoreConx, is doing in bringing trust and compliance between all parties, as businesses - both new and established – turn to tokenisation to raise funds. As Oscar rightly says, crowdfunding was the start of all this. It allowed everyday people around the world the opportunity to participate in an early stage start-up; suddenly you didn’t have to be a high-net-worth individual paying huge fees to investment houses. He himself specialised in equity and debt crowdfun

Scott Picken has been an entrepreneur since his teens, passionate both about property and technology and the wealth that they can and do create. He created Wealth Migrate as a global enterprise five years ago and this now boasts 20k members from 125 countries, $80m in equity and over $520m in total deal value.   More recently Blockchain technology struck him as a golden opportunity to move beyond what's possible with fiat currencies alone and the mission now is it lower the cost of investing while making it universally available - from  $1 per person, per transaction!   There's still a way to go but Scott talks about the progress and vision for the future - including their successful current raise on Seedrs. 

Fed up scanning your passport, driving licence and all the rest to prove who you are? Imagine a world where you only have to input your identity details just once; imagine the time and the hassle that would save. Imagine not having to drag out your passport and your ID documents every time you want to check out an exchange or investigate an ICO investment. Imagine finding access to all that verified, trustworthy information about other participating people, and companies - and even devices! – all via one app. Imagine no more! Blockpass is already here and operating, linking verified people, companies and things in our ecosystem, forming a trusted connection between them. In this episode, Director and CMO Hans Lombardo and Guy Davies, Business Development for UK and Europe, explain how Blockpass offers a self-sovereign identity, user-centric and with the data owned entirely by the owner – Blockpass is a verifier of data and retains no user information. Offering complete confidence that the network of linked pl

This is no time for making plans for 2050 - people are dying - today! It was while studying at Cambridge university that today’s guest Nat Rich realised quite what a state the world is in – and that if people knew some of the stuff she was finding out, they’d be horrified. The problem of carbon emission, and the high NOx levels which kill people, is global, and especially bad in London where it’s easy just to blame the cabs, or the buses, or the trains. We constantly break the EU’s limit for safe pollution levels. And it can only get worse. And government is tackling the issue by charging vehicles for their emissions – rather than trying to solve the problem at source! But the issue goes much further than that. We reply on all sorts of machines to keep the world running, and it’s not just cars or plans or lorries, but also the generators that run our hospitals. It was a few years back that while working within the water industry, Nat had come across a magnetic device that claimed to reduce carbon emissions wh

Why We Need A Blockchain Bill The answer is simple: We want to lead the world, not fall behind.   Once we put the same legal weight behind blockchain technology we long ago did behind paper and 'wet signatures' we can help lead the world  ...replace many of our digital (banking, payments and other) slow toll-roads with far faster highways shrinking times from days to seconds (3 to 30 days through a bank network to 3 seconds on the Ripple network – that’s between 86,400 & 864,000 times faster, so let call it a round 100k times). With a similar reduction in costs, because there are no people involved once the network’s running. This doesn’t just make things a hundred thousand times faster and cheaper, removal of friction on this level makes possible all sorts of things that were completely non-starters before. On top of all that it makes possible a whole list of things proven impossible (at any scale) before. From micropayments to fractionalisation of assets, decoupling ownership from use of an asset (inclu

On the cusp of remaking the world: unlearning everything you learnt at school Or: throwing down the digital gauntlet Global Nomad – ‘Glomad’ - Jane Thomason has been working in international development most of her life, helping developing nations cope with enormous problems - poverty, inequality, and healthcare. In 2010, her son told her someone had invented this digital currency, Bitcoin, and she needed to invest in it. And she laughed at him, and ‘passed’. One of her abiding regrets! He came back a few years later and said, “Mum, you know I told you to buy Bitcoin? Have you got any idea how much it’s worth now?” At that stage it was probably about $7,000, while it was about $10 when he first told her. But on the back of it she started reading up about blockchain even though it was difficult at first - confusing, a bit counter-intuitive. Her moment of realisation came one day when she was thinking about the Banda Aceh Boxing Day Tsunami when 200,000 lives were lost, and where she’d worked on the reconstruct

It's 10 years now since Satoshi wrote the white paper that sparked a revolution and is set to change the Internet, money and so the world A look back at the first ten years, where we're going and how we are doing from the perspective of that original vision. Not least though the choices that lie ahead: Will be we architects of the future now being formed around is, or its victims?

When Lee Birkett launched his online P2P lending and financial product comparison sites on the internet, he says it was a whole new world. Now, he says, Blockchain has the capacity to plug the leaky plumbing in the banking world, globally. Having managed portfolios of £5bn in loans and mortgages over 25 years as a regulated individual, Lee sees credibility and corporate governance as key to public acceptance of blockchain. And while he kept his own head down, hiding from this new technology behind the sofa for many years, the recent involvement of such banks and blue chips as Goldman Sachs with Circle and Barclays with Coinbase, finally convinced him to see some credibility in the sector. So what was it brought risk-averse Lee round to this world, which has been seen as the financial Wild West? The 2008 crash saw Lee’s partners including HBOS, Lehman Brothers and Northern Rock, suddenly unable to support his £100m/month lending business. And yet experience and a long contact list of credible people look