Financial institutions have attempted to integrate digital asset technology for more than a decade with little to show for their efforts. As it stands today, the total value of blockchain-based finance comprises less than one percent of the $300 trillion global system.
The finance industry talks a good game about embracing blockchain, but the truth is much of the sector hopes crypto will prove to be a fleeting technical fad like Blu-Ray, so it can stick to business as usual. My colleagues and I at Franklin Templeton (a nearly 80-year-old, publicly traded financial institution) understand the sentiment.
For legacy financial firms, the task of embracing digital asset technology is a daunting one. It means altering our fee structures and potentially losing revenues associated with intermediary functions, rethinking our product offerings and, quite possibly, disrupting our near-term balance sheets as we learn to operate on blockchain and hold cryptocurrencies to pay for block space.
There’s also the awkward reality that financial institutions made tentative efforts to experiment with blockchain in the past, and it did not go very well. We discovered the hard way there was more hype than substance, and that the tech was incapable of delivering at an institutional-grade level. In the past 2-3 years, though, the situation has changed profoundly.
Public blockchains are evolving into hyper-efficient coordination machines poised to replace aspects of legacy financial infrastructure, while unlocking new forms of value for investors. Solana, one of the first institutionally focused blockchains, has demonstrated an ability to process almost 65,000 transactions per second, a figure on par with the Visa network. Sui, a newer blockchain, has shown an ability to process transactions at almost double that rate. With forthcoming upgrades, public blockchains may soon be able to increase their throughput to hundreds of thousands – and even millions of transactions per second.
Decentralized exchanges, like Uniswap, that allow peer-to-peer market-making without a custodian are nipping at the heels of their centralized counterparts in the legacy world, processing trillions of dollars of transactions each year. As these systems become faster, their verification and security features have experienced significant improvements that make them not only resistant to hacks but also better at proving identity and asset ownership. Indeed, proving who owns what and when they came to own it is no small feat. Just ask hedge fund managers who need to rapidly unwind positions across multiple, disparate accounts.
All these changes are poised to benefit investors and traders. Here are some further examples:
Today’s markets are geographically siloed, which leads to fractured liquidity and diminished investor access to quality assets. Decentralized exchanges can help to integrate global markets – making them more efficient and accessible.
Currently, the process of finalizing transactions can take a day or more, creating imbalanced, and often unfair, outcomes. Consider, for example, that securities are generally only available to trade during market hours. Shareholder ownership records are only updated after trading for the day has been concluded. Investors eligible to receive dividends or interest are determined only once daily based on a start-of-day snapshot of shareholders, and then typically paid their yield at the end of the month. Blockchain-based systems can instead calculate and pay out intraday yield if a tokenized security is transferred or traded throughout the day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, uninterrupted – enabling more accurate and ideally more reliable cash flows.
We believe that the portfolios of the future will increasingly move away from today’s account-based system and rely instead on digital wallets that can hold a limitless number of tokenized assets in a single place – all of which can be transferred instantly, as well as lent out or staked for additional yield.
In the future, blockchains are also poised to offer new financial options for homeowners. Those will include, for instance, portions of home equity—an illiquid asset—to pay premiums on an income-generating annuity product, smoothing the path to retirement. Adapting to, and innovating with, these rapid technological changes will require meaningful — and at times uncomfortable — adjustments to how legacy institutions conduct business and make money. There will be winners and losers. Perhaps sooner than expected, some slow-footed legacy players may face a situation akin to Blockbuster, the once dominant video rental chain wiped out by Netflix and other new streaming services
The advantages of blockchain are so compelling that we don’t foresee the shift to digital asset technology being slow or incremental. Indeed, we expect our industry will evolve more in the next five years than in the last 50. The pressing question is whether financial institutions will choose to embrace the digital asset wave (and the disruption coming with it), actively fight it or bury its head in the sand.
