Bank of Russia Official: Still Too Early to Gauge Blockchain's Potential

[felixesteban]

A senior official at Russia's central bank has argued that time is still needed to understand the full benefits of blockchain technology.

Speaking in a discussion at the annual SPIEF conference in Saint Petersburg, Bank of Russia deputy governor Olga Skorobogatova said blockchain requires improvements in terms of security and scalability, adding that it is still "not mature."

According to a report translated from Russian, she said:

    "In the world, there is still no big industrial solution on distributed ledgers, except for bitcoins ... This is mainly due not to the fact that the technology is not mature enough."

Skorobogatova added, though, that the pausity of large-scale adoption of the technology is partly down to the fact that enterprise execs have not yet understood the value of a move to blockchain.

There are two different areas in which the technology that might be of benefit, she argued, where one is well suited for online operations such as electronic letters of credit – she provided the examples of Ripple and R3's Corda platform – and the other involves working offline and with smart contracts – Ethereum and Hyperledger were cited in this case.

But technology for technology's sake is "pointless," the offical continued, predicting that, this year, the world will come to a greater understanding of blockchain and can then come to better anticipate how the technology will be of use within industrial-scale applications.

https://www.coindesk.com/bank-of-russia-official-still-too-early-to-gauge-blockchains-potential/