The shift has already started; finance is moving onto the blockchain, leveraging the decentralization and disintermediation benefits of the technology’s architecture.
Assets of all kinds are being moved to the blockchain, creating a more efficient and economical system for the transfer of value, and management of fractional ownership. This migration isn’t just disrupting the existing financial system, it’s democratizing access to growth capital across the world.
Today, security for much of the blockchain community relies on an outdated hash algorithm standard (SHA-2), one not best suited to the needs of the demanding financial markets. Existing chains will eventually need to upgrade to what our team has determined to be the best-in-class cryptographic hash function, SHA-3, but new blockchains should implement it now.
These are the very early days of putting securities on the blockchain. As leaders in crypto-securities and blockchain technologies for the capital markets, we must be thoughtful about how we facilitate this transfer of assets; we must ensure that we operate in such a way that lays the groundwork for long-term security and sets a standard for industry best practices. Implementing the best-in-class cryptographic hash function, Secure Hash Algorithm-3 (SHA-3), serves this mission.
The Hash Function
Blockchain technology is disrupting the data management industry. Peer-to-peer networks have promoted the use of cryptography, creating a growing demand in data security and transparency solutions.
A cryptographic hash function is an algorithm that employs mathematics to create a unique digital fingerprint of alphanumeric characters of a fixed size, given an input document of unknown size. This makes the task of comparing the authenticity of a document with an original very simple: Instead of having to read both documents in detail, we can simply compare the much smaller digital fingerprint produced by the hash function.
In peer-to-peer
