Tag Archives: Smart contract

At the BIS 21st Annual Conference in June I discussed work by Alfred Lehar and Christine Parlour on “Systemic fragility in decentralised markets.” The paper and my discussion have now been issued as BIS working paper 1062.

Blog post by Dave Peck and the PSL team. Some issues they discuss: Very few categories of data belong on-chain … Today’s smart contract programming models are deeply flawed … Smart contracts can’t reference the “real-world”. They can only reference the blockchain itself. This is known as the “oracle problem” and it makes blockchains a necessarily closed system. This may sound like a trivial problem, but it is actually profound. For instance, it forces smart contract developers to jump...

The blockchain technology opens up new possibilities for financial market participants. It allows to get rid of middle men and thus, to save cost, speed up clearing and settlement (possibly lowering capital requirements), protect privacy, avoid operational risks and improve the bargaining position of customers. Internet based technologies have rendered it cheap to collect information and to network. This lies at the foundation of business models in the “sharing economy.” It also lets...

In the NZZ, Axel Lehmann offers his views on the prospects of blockchain technologies in banking. Lehmann is Group Chief Operating Officer of UBS Group AG. New possibilities: Higher efficiency; lower cost; more robustness and simpler processes; real-time clearing; no need for intermediaries; information exchange without risk of interference automated “smart contracts;” automated wealth management; more control over transactions; better data protection; improved possibilities for macro...