Global Blockchain Summit: The Philippines is always a leader in technology adoption

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The first Global Blockchain Summit in Bataan was a huge success, attracting thousands of attendees and some key regulators, thought leaders and innovators in the technology, finance and blockchain industries. The Bitcoin SV (BSV) ecosystem was well represented by Brendan Lee, Gareth Roberts, Stefan Matthews, Nicholas King and others, and they all had one message – BSV can transform the Philippines.

Brendan Lee, the founder of Elas Digital, took to the stage on the second day of the event to deliver a keynote presentation on creating private, permissioned ledgers on the public blockchain.

In an interview on the sidelines of the event, Lee warned Filipinos against being tricked into investing in digital assets whose sole purpose is speculation.

“One of the main differences with Bitcoin SV is that we don’t ask people to buy our tokens. When we build projects, we provide the tokens needed as part of the service delivery model. I believe that cryptocurrency is a predatory investment marketplace designed to take people’s money and funneling it into the pockets of people who bought crypto early,” he told local TV network Net25.

Filipinos should focus on blockchain tools instead, he stated. Blockchain can be integrated into any system to make it “faster, much more efficient and much more transparent.”

Lee further debunked the myths surrounding proof of work, a consensus mechanism whose (mis)use of BTC has made it the target of environmentalists and regulators. When implemented correctly, “PoW is a very efficient system that doesn’t use that much energy at all,” he noted.

Digital peso on BSV?

nChain has continued to work with several central banks to explore central bank digital currency (CBDC) distribution on the Bitcoin blockchain. nChain’s Chief Product Officer Gareth Roberts was at the summit to deliver a keynote address on blockchain’s role in the CBDC world.

Roberts also spoke to Net25 and revealed that nChain has built a solution that allows individual systems to have custody of their own tokens. While users can choose to transfer these tokens to their bank accounts, they must first have the ability to hold them in their wallets. This eliminates one of the main points of failure in CBDC design – the need for a bank account.

nChain is also working to enable zero-fee transactions for CBDCs, especially for smaller transactions. According to Roberts, these would be covered in the central banking system.

“Our belief is that blockchain is the best distributed ledger technology. Blockchain has not been hacked in the true implementation it was conceived in the white paper. We see blockchain as enabling CBDCs, as fundamental to CBDCs. We see CBDCs is built on the most secure DLT blockchain and Bitcoin,” he told the outlet.

Stefan Matthews was also at the event and as the Bitcoin veteran revealed, the Philippines is the ideal country for blockchain adoption. Matthews, who is the nChain and TAAL chairman, has lived in the Philippines for over a decade now and has seen the country’s blockchain industry develop into the global leader it is today.

“For this country, with the number of foreign workers we have, and the number of unbanked we have, the use of blockchain for financial services is huge. The use of blockchain for governance is also huge. Those are the two areas I want to focus my attention on,” says Matthews .

For Nicholas King, the nChain country manager for the Philippines, the Southeast Asian country’s large population, which is quite young, is its biggest asset.

“They’re the first to adopt new technology. You look back at cell phones, they were quickly adopted here. Cryptocurrencies have also been adopted here pretty quickly, and as blockchain technology continues to emerge, I’m sure it will be very widely embraced in this country as well.”

To learn more about central bank digital currencies and some of the design decisions that need to be considered when creating and launching it, you’ll want to read nChain’s CBDC playbook.

Watch: nChain’s Nicholas King on CoinGeek Backstage: Blockchain technology will power the Philippines’ digital economy

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