How Blockchain Is Used To Record Financial Transactions
Executive Summary
- Blockchain has been leveraged by financial entities to record banking transactions.
Introduction
How blockchain is integrated into finance is covered in the following quotation.
Banking has become so ridiculously opaque that blockchain, a public and uncontrolled online register has been proposed as a way to provide better accounting. This is covered in the following quotation. “Much of the credit created by the financial system these days is created outside of traditional banks, in what’s colloquially called the “shadow banking system.” The shadow banking industry is highly fragmented, global, interconnected, and regulated by multiple regulators that can see only pieces of the total puzzle. No mechanism exists for rolling its pieces up into an accurate, real-time whole. Long gone are the days when the corner bank simply made loans and regulators could track systemic leverage by adding up those loans. What is it about the shadow banking system that makes systemic leverage so hard to track? Answer: the shadow banking system’s lifeblood is collateral, and the issue is that market players re-use that same collateral over, and over, and over again, multiple times a day, to create credit. The process is called “rehypothecation.” Multiple parties’ financial statements, therefore, report that they own the very same asset at the same time. They have IOUs from each other to pay back that asset — hence, a chain of counterparty exposure that’s hard to track. Although improving, there’s still little visibility into how long these “collateral chains” are. Manmohan Singh at the IMF is the foremost expert on collateral chains in the shadow banking system. He has combed through the footnotes of banks’ financial statements around the world, and he estimates “collateral velocity” is about two. This means only one of the 3 people who think they own a U.S. Treasury bond, for example, actually does own it (by my translation). Singh’s data show this situation has improved since the financial crisis, when 4 parties reported that they owned the same asset. Wall Street critics may jump to criticize, but the industry is working to fix this problem too. No one has had perfect visibility into the industry’s leverage because it was technologically impossible — until blockchains came along — to aggregate multiple trading portfolios on a real-time basis. And no one has more incentive to understand their counterparties’ true financial pictures than the big banks, insurers, pensions and hedge funds themselves. Industry players have the same information regulators have, for the most part — but it’s sparse, disclosed in footnotes of the banks’ financial statements and inconsistent around the world. Some banks disclose it only once a year. It’s no accident that industry players are focused on the multi-trillion dollar repo market as a use case for blockchains, because the repo market is where much of the leverage in the shadow banking system originates. In fact, industry players have shown interest in blockchain technology that will help them restrict which counterparties along the collateral chain can borrow their securities — a desirable feature that simply wasn’t possible until blockchains came along. Rehypothecation is just one of many flavors of systemic leverage that don’t show up on the financial statements of individual financial institutions, but exist in the financial system as a whole — and into which no one has good visibility into the overall picture. Other flavors are fractional reserve banking within traditional banks and naked short selling within securities lending markets. Blockchain companies are working on all of these use cases, and regulators should view these start-ups as sources of tools that can finally give them true visibility into the safety and soundness of the financial system.” – Alt-M.org
Source: Alt M