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Fidelity Labs, the innovation arm of asset manager Fidelity,
will be a member of IC3 along with Cornell University,
University of California at Berkeley, University of Illinois at
Urbana–Champaign, the Technion, IBM Corp and Intel Corp, the
company said in a statement.
The Boston-based fund manager will collaborate with the group to
develop blockchain programs to help make financial systems more
efficient and secure.
Blockchain, which first emerged as the system underpinning
cryptocurrency bitcoin, is a distributed record of transactions
that is maintained by a network of computers, rather than a
centralized authority.
Over the past two years, financial institutions have been
ramping up their investments in the technology in the hopes that
it can help the make some of its processes simpler and cheaper.
Potential use cases range from systems to manage international
payments, to programs to settle securities trades.
In a bid to accelerate development and adoption of blockchain,
companies have been joining forces in several industry consortia
and groups.
Banks have been more vocal about their efforts than asset
managers, with most large lenders having joined a group led by
New York-based startup R3. Most recently a group of 30
companies, including several banks, launched a new blockchain
consortium called the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance.
"What IC3 brings is that academic computer science legacy that
can help us explore how this technology can be applied," said
Hadley Stern, senior vice president at Fidelity Labs, explaining
why the asset manager had chosen the group.
Use cases the asset manager is interested include the settlement
of repurchase agreements transactions, Stern said.
Despite the excitement around blockchain, the technology is
still in its early days and proponents warn that it may take
years before financial institutions can fully reap its benefits.
IC3, which is based at the Jacobs Technion-Cornell Institute at
Cornell Tech in New York City, conducts research aimed at
developing blockchain that meets the standards needed to be
deployed by businesses.
"Expected outcomes of our work include new blockchain and smart
contract technologies that are secure, incrementally deployable,
and efficient to meet the industry's needs," said Emin Gün Sirer,
co-director of IC3 and a professor at Cornell University in
Ithaca, New York
(Reporting by Anna Irrera; Editing by Lisa Shumaker)
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