"If you take the software and use it for personal purposes, you can do whatever you want with it," Shau explains

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But while blockchains were first created to track cryptocurrency, experts say there’s no reason why the technology can’t be used for other types of assets, from stocks to event tickets or even old-fashioned U.S. currency. “The blockchain is just a log, it just tells who owns what and who sent what to whom,” says Shaw. “Being able to know for sure that it happened is what’s important.”

Overstock transferred the crypto bond purchased by Patrick Byrne, as well as a second, “pilot” bond ( bought by financial firm First New York for $5 million ), and recorded it in a public ledger using the Open Assets standard, designed to record all transfers in a publicly accessible database .
Other companies, such as Blockstack, are developing technology that would allow financial institutions to create their own private chains, changing certain parameters to better suit their purposes.


Banks may want to change the limits on block sizes, or the speed at which they are posted to the network, security parameters, and other settings. Or they may want to keep their chains accessible only to list of qatar cell phone numbers their trading partners via a secure network. They may also want to implement support for so-called “ smart contracts ” — essentially simple programs built into these chains that define the rules for transferring assets. They make it possible to automate procedures like split or interest payments, or temporarily block funds in an account. These programs are then stored in the same databases as the assets themselves.

Some experts say banks’ needs could be met with other data structures. Once banks control access to shared logs, they could rely on Bitcoin technology to achieve the same goals, Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University, said in a recent post .

In fact, banks may often be more comfortable sticking with their existing technology, says Paul Chu, CEO of LedgerX , a startup building trading infrastructure for bitcoin derivatives. “If you need to restrict access to certain parties to a trade, then a managed public database is a simple and proven solution, no need for blockchains,” he wrote in an email to Fast Company. And if banks decide they can’t gain much efficiency from blockchain-based systems, they may not be worth the risk. “Imagine how scary it would be to rebuild an entire new system with a data warehouse that was invented a few years ago,” he writes. “Only if banks find a technology that can improve the process by an order of magnitude, or at least 10 times more efficient, will it make sense to completely abandon slow but proven platforms.”

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