Are Blockchain Smart Contracts the Future of Financial Markets?

This post takes a quick look at how blockchain smart contracts are changing the game in today’s securities markets. It won’t focus much on other financial markets like currencies, commodities, or derivatives, but those areas could also be shaken up by this whole crypto-ledger technology trend since those assets can be tokenized, and many are getting tokenized already. A smart contract is basically software that operates on cryptographic distributed ledgers like blockchain, Hedera Hashgraph, DAG, and a few others. How long do you think it’ll be before traditional financial market systems are swapped out for blockchain smart contract-based setups?

Tokenisation is nothing new in the current financial market. One of the examples of tokenisation is ETF. Where the ETF company assigns you some unit based on your investment whose value is based on the underlying asset. It's just that ETFs have not yet implemented decentralized ledger technology. So the structure might be little different currently but the end result is same! It's a big change and it won't happen overnight. Gradually things will move to blockchain based systems as such changes require a huge change management planning and execution capabilities. Additionally it requires huge investment as well to handle and accommodate such changes. Looking at the current economic scenario, the chance of such overhaul looks really grim atm. Understand the business perspective of it. Moving into a blockchain based system is an internal change and won't drive additional volumes to the business. Definitely it will do some certain percentage of cost cutting but unless that cost cutting volume is a huge one, no company will be interested in doing that! Such kind of changes will be driven by startups in fintech sector and probably they will be the pioneers in blockchain and smarr contract kknd of things but I don't see much hope for conglomerates unless they are sitting on a huge pile of unused cash!