Rebuilding Trust Through Blockchains and Open Source

Global confidence in institutions is in steep decline worldwide, from politics to business to schools and non-profits. Technology lets us down too, from AWS outages to surveillance teddy bears. Trust …

Global confidence in institutions is in steep decline worldwide, from politics to business to schools and non-profits. Technology lets us down too, from AWS outages to surveillance teddy bears. Trust is essential to building a functioning society, but it’s under serious threat. Open source software showed us how we could work together, even if we had no presumption to trust each other. Blockchain technology: distributed ledgers, smart contract systems, and more - take this a step further, helping us build distributed systems without requiring a controlling central actor. Marta Piekarska, Director of Ecosystem at Hyperledger will speak to how she believes we’re heading towards a future full of different blockchain ecosystems for different purposes and to keep it becoming a confusing mess, or worse a platform war, collaboration on common software infrastructure is key. The Open Source communities behind Linux, Apache, and other successful platform technologies have demonstrated how to do this successfully. She will speak to what Hyperledger is and how it is aimed at bringing that dynamic to the blockchain community, so that everyone can spend less time worrying about the plumbing and more time building new products and services.