Today, it takes one click to buy a concert ticket or a new pair of shoes, but if you want to buy stocks, get a mortgage, or pay someone in another country, the transactions are more time intensive. Assets like gold, real estate, fine art or carbon credits are more difficult to transfer, often leaving buyers and sellers with paperwork and lengthy procedures. By representing physical assets and currency as digital assets on a distributed digital ledger or blockchain, it’s possible to unlock the value of real-world assets and to exchange them in real time. Much like the internet 25 years ago, a steady progression of innovation can arise from a real-time, interconnected world with the potential to sequentially and substantially disrupt markets.

Programming descriptions are generated by participants and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of SXSW.