As it’s dominating so much of my time and effort at the moment, I’m going to continue writing about Cryptocurrencies and distributed ledger. In the past, I have talked about the amount of work in London currently being undertaken to create marketplaces to buy and sell cryptocurrencies and the exciting opportunities that process is creating for technologists who currently work within the financial markets.

The more I delve into this emerging sector, the more I realise that this really is just the tip of the iceberg. There is a simply vast amount of work to be done to unlock the potential of Blockchain/distributed ledger technology and then get in integrated into world markets. There is what appears to be a race currently underway between the likes of R3, IBM and Ethereum to get the technology moving. I have mainly been concentrating on b2b transactions when researching businesses to work with but more recently I have been thinking about b2c.

I have seen a few businesses popping up which are building capability to ready consumer markets for cryptocurrency-based spending. WIREX looks like it is aiming at facilitating bitcoin purchase, money transfers, bitcoin wallet facility and bitcoin payment methods. However, assuming that cryptocurrencies get as far as mass consumer spending, there is going to need to be a whole ecosystem of businesses in place to facilitate this new phenomenon.

In my view, distributed ledger and consumer payment/cryptocurrency management businesses will create more opportunities for entrepreneurs and technologists than the cryptocurrency markets themselves.

We haven’t seen fundamental change to the way we transact of this magnitude ever before; distributed ledger is already spreading into fiat currency-based transactions from cryptocurrencies. Having spent almost 10 years recruiting in the ‘traditional’ financial markets technology space, the emerging decentralised and crypto market is truly fascinating and as a technologist it really should be on your radar if you don’t want to get left behind!