Australian Securities Exchange CEO: blockchain will soon be the norm

The CEO of the Australian Securities Exchange believes that everyone will be using blockchain technology in the next two to seven years.

ASX CEO Peter Hiom made the bold claim about the future of blockchain while speaking on an industry panel held this week at Sydney’s vForum conference.

He told the audience: "We believe we'll stop talking about this technology in a few years; it'll just be how data gets shared,” with the caveat that blockchain is still emerging as a technology and that widespread adoption won’t happen straight away. 

"I personally think this technology is still in its early stages and this will take time to be deployed and everyone will have their own entry point," he said. "Ours just happens to be clearance and settlement. For somebody else, it'll be a different system change out or process efficiency as their entry point.

He noted that enterprise deployment of blockchain will come “perhaps sooner than some people think,” adding that, “we do believe it will be something we'll stop talking about. In 15 years' time, we'll be wondering about how we used to do things."

Hiom explained how ASX is using blockchain’s distributed ledger, and how it could aid businesses that share data with different parties. "Because of the secret source of distributed ledgers, the key to that is you can independently verify yourself […] without having to go back to ASX to prove it, you don't have to message backwards and forwards,” he said. 

He claimed that the ability to disseminate and synchronise data among different parties would benefit organisations across all industries, including insurance, legal, trade, financial, financial or logistics.