MoneyConf Dublin 2018: CEOs And Their (Positive) Stance On Decentralization

The MoneyConf Dublin 2018 conference which covers the topics of fintech, crypto, and blockchain, recently gathered some of the top executives from companies like Ledger, Blockchain.info and VC firms Mosaic Ventures and FuturePerfect to discuss if and why decentralized systems are necessary for the future.

The moderator of the conference, Joon Ian Wong, referred the panelists to a specific survey where they will be given the hypothetical choice to have a paid version of Facebook that does not harvest data or display ads – where the majority of people would opt to use the free version and trade their data instead.

Wong also said that people perhaps don’t want decentralized platforms after all. The panelists, on the other hand, had a lot to say, mainly on the lack of public understanding or mainstream interest stemming from centralized data systems.

The founding partner Jalak Jobanputra of VC capital firm FuturePerfect was among the loudest, saying:

“I have a fund invested in several companies that are building decentralized identity platforms and once that becomes the norm we’ll wonder why we gave all our data away for free and allowed ourselves to be exposed in such ways.”

Toby Coppel of Mosaic Ventures followed with his stance that the inability of centralized leadership will arbitrarily change rules and alter agreements – which makes decentralized platforms hugely attractive to investors.

The CEO of Ledger, Eric Larcheveque, also pointed out that censorship is now a major use case for decentralized platforms – while the Blockchain CEO Nick Cary said that it is the opaque business practices, corruption, and trade manipulation that are all present in our centralized society.

According to Larcheveque:

“The biggest investment model of decentralization right now is speculation. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but it’s very early. A lot of the money is done by mining and an ICO is the objective… for that to work, you need infrastructure and then you have a few business models which are really working.”

Nick Cary of Blockchain agreed to this, saying the following:

“Just because you do an ICO tomorrow and raise a tonne of money does not mean you will inevitably have some sort of incredible business. In fact, it may misalign your incentives to grind through the challenges in the early days.”

He also went to clarify that building infrastructure and hiring talented people costs money – and that investing in a token business model is a useful one for decentralized revenue generation.