Wendy Gross
Apr 25, 2018
In a recent feature in CBA National, the regular publication of the Canadian Bar Association, Agnese Smith examines the rising popularity of blockchain technology and explores the likelihood of the platform being truly adopted in the mainstream – which would require eliminating trusted third parties and intermediaries, including bankers, governments and social networks. Currently, blockchain is facing a number of significant technical challenges, such as scalability, that threaten its widespread adoption. Smith discusses the potential of permission-less or public blockchain which she describes as a “way to store data on a global ledger,” with unrelated computers validating it with the goal of creating a “secure, verifiable and permanent record” of transactions. Currently, the most common example of permission-less blockchain is Bitcoin. In the article, Wendy Gross, Co-Chair of the Technology Group in Osler’s Toronto office, weighs in on the future of public blockchain.
As she explains, permission-less blockchains have “captured the public’s interest because of [their] transformational potential. But at the moment, beyond cryptocurrency and related applications, we are not seeing many practical implementations or broad adoptions of use cases for permission-less blockchain.”
To learn more about blockchain, read Agnese Smith’s full article “Are we putting too much trust in blockchain?” on the CBA National website.