From ancient times, humankind has looked to the skies and wanted to understand our world better. In the last century, our species has taken off into the stars and now we can all see the world from above, providing us with a better perspective on life and detailed information about geography and the world we inhabit.
In the same way that taking to the skies gave us insights about our physical world, blockchain technology can provide insights into our digital world. My company, Soramitsu, is a blockchain company based in Tokyo, Japan. We are building the next generation of smart blockchains, using digital identity to link the digital blockchain world with users in the physical world.
What do I mean by "the next generation of smart blockchains?" This is something that I will write more on in future posts, but the goal of such a system is to empower people, helping with decision making, automation, and safe management of assets; the ultimate goal is to make the world a better place. Technology should be made to help human society, rather than developing technology for technology's sake. The American philosopher Lewis Mumford called this polytechnic (in contrast to monotechnic) [1], signifying that technology beneficial to humanity should be multifaceted in order to meet the needs of society.
Additionally, we must also work to make our financial system more focused on sustainability, with clearly defined boundaries [2]. To help with this, we are developing a new digital store of value called the Sora (Sora means sky in Japanese). Just as the sky covers the whole world, we hope that Sora will also become a global movement that can empower people by giving them control over their stores of value and also enable them to transact in a purely digital environment.
Democratizing finance by turning value into digital data is a passion of ours and we want to help create open infrastructure to support this. A part of this initiative is our continued contribution to open source blockchain development, in the form of Hyperledger Iroha. We originally created Iroha and contributed it to the Linux Foundation's Hyperledger project, because we wanted to create simple tools to allow people to create and manage any kind of arbitrary asset. This is important as we move into the age of the digital economy, which will be dominated by humans augmented with superintelligent artificial intelligence.
Mumford, L. (1934). Technics and civilization. University of Chicago Press. ↩︎
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/27/opinion/how-big-banks-became-our-masters.html ↩︎