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broken; payments industry stakeholders are just trying curate, real-time and fully transparent. This enables
to build a stronger, more united ecosystem. According to people all over the world to interact without paying
Nicholds, the world of payments in which we've been liv- third party-intermediary costs.
ing has been dominated by big international card brands,
which are brilliant and, from a consumer point of view, 3. Trustless nature: Today, hundreds of billions of dol-
they just work, which is a great value. Then you have open lars go to intermediaries who say Party A and Party
banking and digital currencies that broaden our choices B don't trust each other, so let's pay them to do that.
and give us different ways of doing things, he added. Having an immutable ledger with smart contracts on
the blockchain replaces this type of trust with code.
Jennifer Mitrenga, head of Americas, Provenance at Figure
Technologies Inc., discussed cryptocurrency and block- "These three exciting features reflect the beauty behind
chain technology features and benefits in a Jan. 21, 2021, bitcoin and digital assets and what that technology can do
panel hosted by NYC FinTech Women and sponsored by across a number of sectors," Mitrenga said.
Shearman & Sterling LLP.
Nicholds pointed out that the ultimate aim is improving
"The beauty behind bitcoin is the technology, which is the customer experience. "Consumers are looking for easy,
blockchain, and its implications have massive addressable convenient safe, secure, fast payments," he said. "Whether
market opportunities," Mitrenga said. She summarized it's open banking or a digital dollar, the objective of all
the three benefits of blockchain technology as follows: these initiatives is to give people a better experience and
that's what we will expect from payments going forward."
1. Distributed database: A distributed database en-
ables multiple financial institutions to validate a sin-
gle account balance. Today we rely on an API or an Dale S. Laszig, senior staff writer at The Green Sheet and managing
interface to tell us an account balance, but it's not truly director at DSL Direct LLC, is a payments industry journalist and content
distributed or accountable.
strategist. She can be reached at dale@dsldirectllc.com and on Twitter
2. Immutable ledger: An immutable database allows at @DSLdirect.
you to see changes or edits that are completely ac-

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