Silent Notary making waves on Cbonds Congress

Last Thursday, Nov 15 Silent Notary together with Cbonds Congress hosted a conference “Blockchain and Crypto Assets for market experts”.

The conference took place in Moscow and captured the attention of many prominent fintech companies from Russia and CIS. Sberbank, VTB, Alpha Bank are top-3 banks in Russia and Eastern Europe. All of them are actively applying DLT in payment processing optimization.

SilentNotary CEO Alexey Petrov showcased Chain-in-Law as a promising platform for legal interactions and small scale financial optimization.

Right after the CiL presentation took place a panel, dedicated to blockchain standards implementation and data exchange efficiency, which was moderated by SilentNotary founder Max Breus.

Besides that, the conference help 5 more panels, which was about such topics, as:

• Fintech regulations and infrastructure in Russia.
• Standardizing blockchains and data exchange efficiency.
• Investment ideas for crypto assets.
• Practical use cases of blockchain for finance.
• From now to the future: a change for the world and financial market.

In the conference participated representatives of biggest Russian companies like Gazprom, Sberbank, Alfabank, GroupIB, AddCapital. The atmosphere of the event was a sharp contrast between top-tier professional discussions during the panels instantly switching to warm and easy-going on the coffee breaks.

A brief summary of the key points most experts has agreed upon:

• DLT is ready to be used for business optimization. The legislation is in place for that. The technology is in the process of maturation. The developers are the bottleneck.
• ICO is a toxic word that makes things harder for all blockchain related startups.
• The greatest potential in the nearest future is private blockchain systems. This is the tech that solves legacy code crisis for banks. But there’s still some problems, connected with such systems isolation (which is actually solved by CiL).
• Financial system architects are the next bankers.

Worth noting particularly insightful report, which was made by Denys Dodon, Head of Center for Innovations Research and Development at Alfa-Bank.

His report was centered around benefits of private blockchains in multi-party clearing systems. The report showcased application of Corda blockchain in a payment loop between S7 Airlines, their customers and fuel suppliers. The insightful part was the reason why the bank needed the blockchain at all. As it turned out the Alfa-Bank faced some issues with their IT department.

Apparently they fire developers in generations with no experience exchange between them and poor documentation. As a result every next generation of bank developers builds software on top of a black box. The entire electronic ecosystem of a bank is a wobbly stack of such black box solutions. It’s a bank software, nonetheless and it works reliably. At the cost of speed. So if you use it to track payments and money flow between several agents like customers, company and suppliers then it may take weeks to process everything. Also the system lacks transparency. As a solution Alfa-Bank deployed a distributed ledger that tracked all the payments on top of the banking system, had instant speed and was perfectly transparent to every party. The question is when do the bank figures it out and throws away it’s old sloppy black box tower. But this is a story for another day.

Overall it was a live event that provided a moderate boost to SNTR team’s morale. The market may fall but the industry is booming. SilentNotary and Chain-in-Law are projects that fit well into this new paradigm where power and wealth gradually shifts from institutions to networks. To be more precise, SilentNotary is a service that moves trust and fact checking from outdated notary institutions to the distributed networks that operate quicker, cheaper and globally. Chain in Law is an elegant open-source toolbox for smaller players who can’t afford tens of millions USD for using Corda or similar overly-engineered solutions. After CIL mainnet launch every smart person can be his\her own banker and corporate lawyer. A reasonably inspiring niche to have.