“I’m a bank. What can I do with Eris Industries’ free software?”
Hello there, bank. Well, you can do just about anything that involves managing data without investing heavily in physical and human infrastructure. Some of the things we’ve tinkered with include:
-
Really. We’re not kidding. Do it.
-
Back-office business process automation with smart contracts is therefore one of the things we do at EI.
-
Real-time gross settlement systems. Clearing and settlement systems are dead easy to deploy with an ErisDB. Just write your application, roll your chain in one command and you’re off to the races. Bye-bye, buildings, servers, and employees.
-
Re: clearing, this includes FX, securities, whatever else - all doable. If you can write it, an Eris blockchain will run it. Post-trade processing should be possible too.
-
Asset creation and tracking and event control, as implemented by our friends over at Everledger.io. Here’s our tutorial on how to get your own system rolling.
-
Task management and reputation management, as implemented by Microwork.
-
Digital identity, such as we’re proposing to do with our friends at Identifi.org (repo).
-
Corporate decisionmaking and coordination such as bondholder or shareholder resolutions.
-
Or just making a really killer interactive web application like 2Gather (repo here).
The only way the institutional giants will trim down (which they all want to) is by aggressively tearing down legacy infrastructure - human and machine - and replacing it with fully automatic, low-cost, self-managing databases.
Smart contract blockchain cryptography increases the verifiability and certainty of business process in a way that makes it the obvious choice to accomplish that objective in the medium-term. And for their part, challengers - such as the three startups we mentioned above - can leverage this technology too as cheapo infrastructure to scale inexpensively.
“Disruption” ahoy.
Of course, there are a whole bunch of things we’re working on behind the scenes for our clients which we can’t talk about. But this should give you a good idea of the wide range of things smart contracts can do!