Accenture’s Melanie Cutlan and David Treat spoke with SiliconRepublic.com at the Hyperledger Global Forum the importance of blockchain interoperability and the “competitive edge” of digital wallet infrastructure.
“The metaverse will affect everything we do, from consumers to businesses, to how you manage your business, to the products you buy.”
That’s according to Melanie Cutlan, Accenture MD and head of metaverse technology, who spoke at the Hyperledger Global Forum in Dublin yesterday (September 12).
The gathering continues today, featuring more than 100 speakers discussing important business issues for the Hyperledger community such as blockchain interoperability, climate change, digital identity, and tokenomics.
Speaking at the event, Cutlan said the momentum of the metaverse is creating a defining moment for leaders in the blockchain space.
A focus on the metaverse
Accenture has shown that the metaverse has already entered the world of work. Earlier this year, we spoke to Accenture Ireland’s talent brand manager, Kevin Ennis, about how the company is using the metaverse as part of its recruitment and onboarding strategies.
The consultancy revealed that it was able to onboard 150,000 employees during the Covid-19 pandemic using its metaverse technology.
Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, Cutlan said it was necessary to create a sense of “unity” and “collaboration” to onboard such a large volume of employees.
“It comes with a whole experience out of the box, you don’t just get a device, but you actually get the experience of connecting with other people,” Cutlan said.
Accenture has been researching the metaverse for around 15 years, with more than 600 patents related to the concept. The company has shared plans to continue making inroads into the metaverse, with its Indian arm playing a key role in those ambitions, Coingeek reports.
“We made a statement in 2013 that every business would be a digital business, and we got some interesting reactions then,” Cutlan said. “The statement now is that the metaverse affects all of our lifestyles, so there’s kind of no business left across the board. And we’ve seen that consistent engagement across the board.”
This view was shared by David Treat, senior MD, global metaverse continuum business group and blockchain leader at Accenture. Treat is also chairman of the Hyperledger Foundation.
“We basically demonstrated that if you have an employee, the metaverse can help from an onboarding, training, culture-building, community, collaboration perspective,” Treat told SiliconRepublic.com. “So any company that has an employee will be able to benefit.”
Blockchain interoperability
Cutlan noted that new innovations are emerging on the internet, such as the “ownership internet”. This is where blockchain and other technologies can create verifiable digital identities, so that new digital products and currencies can be created.
Treat said the conversation around blockchain has moved on from the “Cambrian explosion” of different projects recently, to a discussion around the “combinations and relationships between projects”.
Treat previously told SiliconRepublic.com that blockchain is like a team sport. Yesterday he spoke about the importance of the Hyperledger Global Forum for discussions around blockchain interoperability.
“This is the only place to talk through the whole idea of the hybrid models that are going to take advantage of different ledgers for different purposes with different capabilities,” Treat said.
Treat said he has spoken to clients who have been “paralyzed from moving forward” on projects because they were worried about choosing the wrong blockchain technology. He noted that a focus on interoperability between blockchain technologies helps remove concerns about choosing the “Betamax” option.
“If you enable an environment to allow more than one ledger to succeed and then work through interoperability, we can focus on advancing the more valuable pieces of functionality, efficiency, capabilities and the like,” Treat said.
Digital wallets: A competitive frontier
One area of development that both Treat and Cutlan are interested in is the idea of digital wallets that allow users to carry their identity, money and items from place to place.
“The winning digital business in the next period is the one that creates the most reliable access to that wallet,” Treat said. “So if you help design the standards and the infrastructure for that, I think that’s the competitive edge for a lot of companies.”
Treat said there are three industries best positioned to go after this “frontier”, which are financial services, the telecom industry and ultimately hardware and cloud providers.
“So how that plays out between the three industries, I think it’s going to be fascinating,” Treat said.
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