Report: UK Has The Potential To Become The World’s Blockchain Hub

An article published on the Bitrazzi on 16 July 2018

By Habiba Tahir

UK’s three leading analytical companies, Big Innovation Centre, DAG Global and Deep Knowledge Analytics, have published a report which states that UK has the industrial and government resources to become the world leader in blockchain technology by the year 2020. Sean Kiernan, co-founder and CEO of DAG Global, told The Guardian:

The UK is a major global financial hub and in recent years has become a fintech leader as well. At the same time, it is starting to demonstrate significant potential to become a leader in blockchain technologies and the crypto economy. The gap between the two worlds of traditional finance and crypto economy remains, but in the coming years we can expect this to lessen and eventually disappear.

Blockchain, along with cryptocurrencies, gained popularity in 2017. However, regulators all over the world welcomed distributed ledger technology while frowning upon cryptocurrencies. According to this report, £500 million was invested in blockchain firms from the year 2017 to 2018 in the UK.

Birgitte Andersen, CEO and co-founder of Big Innovation Centre, said, “Blockchain has been recognised by the UK parliament as a very important and disruptive technology, and it has shown commitment to support the accelerated development of the digital economy via a variety of government initiatives.”

This month, the government of UK also published a whitepaper on the relationship between Britain and the European Union (EU) after Brexit. Although the paper didn’t mention blockchain, it explained a process that bore similarities to the new technology. While describing trade systems, it was written that the UK would try to find ways to share data internationally, “including potentially the storing of the entire chain of transactions … while enabling that data to be shared securely between traders and across relevant government departments.” Such a technology would need data to be inputted only once, similar to distributed ledger technology.