Spanish bank Banco Bilbao Vizcaya Argentaria (BBVA) has joined the European Union’s (EU) new blockchain initiative.
Image: BBVA joins EU blockchain initiative. Photo: Courtesy of Markus Spiske/Unsplash
The publicly sponsored initiative intends to garner support from private blockchain and DLT experts to contribute to outline the EU’s strategy regarding these technologies.
The European Union convened representatives from public institutions and private sector to a conference entitled ‘Uniting EU Industries to lead blockchain technologies.’
Europe is well placed to seize the opportunity, as a single digital market with over 500 million citizens, with significant investments in research and robust framework to protect privacy and build trust in digital services.
For this to happen, close cooperation between the public and private sectors must be developed. Governments and economic actors must work together to overcome regulatory obstacles, increase legal predictability, take up international standardization efforts and to speed up research and innovation to support scalability of innovative blockchain technologies.
BBVA research & development new digital business head Carlos Kuchkovsky, represented the Spanish bank at the EU forum.
Kuchkovsky stressed the important role this project could have in terms of establishing blockchain best practice and standards and to avoid fragmentation on a European level. He also stated that this is an opportunity for the region, which is positioned, with its current level of data protection and privacy management and it can influence global standards.
As per Kuchkovsky, blockchain and other new technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) have to be understood as simple pieces that make digital ecosystems reliable. There must be more clarity to remove regulatory uncertainty that currently surrounds the use of these technologies.
He finally reiterated that blockchain is not only a technology, but it engenders new business models creating a ‘tokenized economy’ and ‘paving the way to a decentralised economy in the future.’