In a prepared testimony to Congress on the topic of digital asset regulation, Hoskinson claims that blockchain technology, due to its decentralised and permissionless nature, helps marketplaces thrive.
“Distributed ledgers (i.e., blockchains) store information that needs to be transparent, auditable, timestamped and immutable. This process enables records of social and economic concerns to be reliable and programmable.
Public blockchains, just like many commodities, are intrinsically decentralized and permissionless. For example, I grow hay on my farm in Colorado. I did not ask for permission to plant and harvest my hay, and now I am a member of a global, dynamic marketplace. There are regulations and controls in all of these markets, but we do not assume there is a centralized hay agency to ensure somehow this market works.
Such absurdities were reserved for the Soviet central planners of old, not modern economies. Blockchain projects operate and embody this decentralized ethos and would fail under the weight of a heavy-handed and outdated regulatory structure.”
According to the CEO of Input Output Hong Kong (IOHK), digitising large-scale businesses’ logistics would make them more organised and transparent to regulators.
“As a rancher, I have to deal with water rights, grazing leases, public land authorities, and numerous other agreements, covenants and economic events.
The management and oversight of much of these activities are not digitized, nor are they shared in ways to provide emergent value to policymakers, regulators and researchers. When these activities are conducted and managed, and the resulting information is shared, on a blockchain they are transparent and auditable.”
According to Hoskinson, Cardano developer IOHK is collaborating with the Ethiopian government to develop blockchain-based digital identities and academic records for students and teachers to track their achievements and credentials.
“[We are] working with Ethiopia’s Ministry of Education to create a blockchain-based digital identity and verifiable academic credentials for five million students and teachers in the country.
The goal of this vital project is to enable data-driven policy-making and simultaneously allow students to prove their educational achievements internally and across borders to universities and the job market by reducing the risk of fraud.”
Hoskinson also claims that his company assists small-to-medium-sized businesses in gaining access to lending services that they would otherwise be unable to take advantage of.
“In Kenya and Ghana, in order to tackle the financing gap through an ecosystem of products that remove the frictions between crypto liquidity and real-world economic activities to offer cheaper financial products, IOG has partnered with Pezesha Africa Limited to facilitate loans to small and medium sized businesses looking for short term loans for working capital. The goal is to build simple friction-free tools that enable seamless lending.”
