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Thousands of individuals from around the world were glued to their screens during the Manama Entrepreneurship Week (MEW); particularly to Juan Llanos’s talk on ‘Blockchain, Crypto and the Dawn of a New Age of Creativity’.
The seasoned financial compliance expert, who was one of the first TEDx speakers on Bitcoin, shared his know-how and expertise on crypto and blockchain.
“We’re witnessing the beginning of a new age of creative possibilities facilitated by these new technologies,” said Juan, who was invited by the US Embassy of Bahrain to chair the session in the seventh edition of MEW.
The week-long virtual event was held under the theme of ‘Rebuilding More Sustainable Equitable Post-Covid Economies’.
“A key word here is ‘alternative’,” added the chief compliance officer of financial payment company Ripio.
“Crypto enables the creation of ‘alternative’ forms of money, payments as well as custody and value representations on an ‘alternative’ family of technologies that permit, for instance, the secure automation of many transactional processes that today require a myriad of human controls.
“More important than the technical details is the potential impact that these technologies can have around the world. Many of the UN’s sustainable development goals are already being advanced with innovations arising from crypto technologies.
“My goal was to pique people’s interest so they can do their own research as it’s a complex topic and has many entry points.”
According to Juan, an anti-money laundering specialist who helps FinTech start-ups launch and grow, crypto is a new family of technologies that has emerged to complement or even replace part of the traditional, inefficient infrastructure used today for the creation, storage and distribution of value.
Many investors consider Bitcoin to be the original cryptocurrency. Founded in 2009 by a programmer (or, possibly, a group of programmers) under the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin ushered in a new age of blockchain technology and decentralised digital currencies.
“The first successful crypto technology – the Bitcoin blockchain – was actually released after the global financial crisis of 2008,” explained Juan.
“Many of the technologists working on Wall Street and its global equivalents that were made redundant as a result of the crises moved on to work on alternative projects. One of those was cryptographic networks.
“When the price of Bitcoin grew from a few dollars to over a thousand dollars in 2013, the proof of concept of the first blockchain seemed to have succeeded.”
The second event that helped the whole industry flourish was the emergence, in 2016-2017, of a way to create crypto tokens on top of a newly released super-network called Ethereum.
“Now, in 2021, we’re experiencing a third peak in the evolution of the technology, this time around accompanied by all-time-highs in the prices of many of the crypto tokens that were released over the years and I see it continuing to evolve relentlessly.”
Today, there are many more avenues, especially for individuals of the younger generation.
“For example, creating and distributing digital art and earning royalties on crypto-networks via crypto tokens known as non-fungible tokens or NFTs,” he added.
NFTs are unique computer-generated codes that are embedded into assets like art pieces, enabling them to be traded and verified for authenticity.
Bahraini toymaker Abdulla BinHindi is one of the first creatives in Bahrain to embed NFTs into his popular toys. Bahrain-based French street artist Arnaud Rothfuss also integrated cryptocurrencies into his artwork.
“I encourage every one of your readers to get involved in crypto, to study in depth its characteristics, risks and transformative potential,” he added. “It’s the most interesting and important technology of this generation.”
