Eddy Travia, CEO of Coinsilium and pioneer investor in Blockchain technologies being interview on CNBC

Today, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and other alt-coins are accepted by major retailers including Whole Foods, JC Penny, Gap and even the renowned Dadiani Art Gallery in Mayfair, London. In short, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are going mainstream.

The nascent technology offers a major breakthrough in providing decentralised, permissionless and cryptographically-secured programmable digital currency. For a technology which has been in existence for only ten years, it is already having a major impact on many industries, with proponents waxing lyrical about it’s ability to transform commerce and disintermediate age-old institutions, while detractors sneer in contempt and regale us with stories of 17th Century Tulip mania. If nothing else, bitcoin has succeeded as the largest network of computing power the world has ever seen.

The real technological innovation lies in the open-source, cryptographically-secured ledger known as the “Blockchain”, which validates transactions and groups them into “blocks” for miners to confirm. Prior to Satoshi Nakamoto’s invention there was no way to send digital currency with absolute certainty that the same currency hadn’t already been spent or wouldn’t be spent again. This is known as the “double-spend” problem. By including details of the sender’s previous transactions and generating a unique identifier for each new transaction, the blockchain overcomes this issue and allows miners to navigate the network with clarity on whether a bitcoin is indeed owned by a sender and able to be spent. The blockchain also allows for virtually anything that can be digitised to be represented on it’s ledger, with time-stamping and proof of ownership creating mass appeal across a number of industries concerned with timely, transparent and efficient global transactions. It is no wonder that blockchain technology is being seriously researched by every major bank, who realise that this technology could allow them to do away with costly and bureaucratic third-party clearing and settlement houses, saving potentially billions of dollars per year in operations. The ability to track provenance and guarantee originality is also perfectly suited to those selling high value and rare items. One example of this is Everledger’s blockchain solution which creates a digital thumbprint to prove ownership of diamonds and other valuable assets, and BlockVerify is another startup using the immutable ledger technology for anti-counterfeit protection of luxury goods.

From the foundation of bitcoin and it’s proof-of-work blockchain, a whole ecosystem has grown which promises to change the way we interact and transact with each other. The Ethereum protocol has emerged as an added blockchain layer, allowing for programmable “smart-contracts” to be created and executed in the same decentralised, peer-to-peer environment that bitcoin offers. If bitcoin is equated to gold as a store of value, ethereum is more akin to natural gas; capable of adapting to power a multitude of different products and services. It is from this technology that we have seen an explosion in the “Token economy” – a re-democratization of company finance and capital markets, allowing any company to issue their own digital currency and any investor or speculator to own the same currency in exchange for Ethereum or Bitcoin. Unlike traditional shares, these tokens can assume multiple properties at the same time, such as being a native currency on a specific platform, or representing validation and voting rights on a network, all while concurrently representing a stake in a company or project.

2017 has been the year of the token economy, with the equivalent of $1bn raised by blockchain companies via the sale of digital tokens. The new token economy offers innovative entrepreneurs the opportunity to create game-changing models and disrupt multibillion-dollar industries such as social media as is the case of Coinsilium’s latest addition to its portfolio of investments, Singapore-based Indorse: a decentralised social network for professionals. Indorse will also allow its members to profit from sharing their skills and activities on the platform via reward tokens. Multimillion-dollar hedge funds, such as HyperChain Capital, with whom Coinsilium has signed a co-investing MoU, have recently emerged with the sole objective of acquiring and trading these blockchain-based tokens.

Coinsilium is a venture-builder, investor and accelerator supporting early-stage blockchain technology companies and the digital token economy. Coinsilium shares are traded in London.

Thanks to the emergence of Digital Currency, Coinsilium has entered an age of financial freedom like never before, brought on by the ability to securely exchange value digitally, without the need for a trusted third-party. The token economy is just kicking off and it’s already moving at break-neck speed. The true value of many projects in this space is yet to be determined, but the new business model by which they are operating is here to stay.

Disclosure: This article included contributed information from Eddy Travia, CEO of Coinsilium and a pioneer investor in blockchain technologies. He can be contacted at eddytravia@coinsilium.com