You’ve probably heard a lot about Bitcoin, and the people who became very rich from it. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are thousands of cryptocurrencies in existence today, like Ether (built on Ethereum, the most actively used blockchain) and Dogecoin (which started as a joke).
Matthew Reyes (BMath ’19), co-founder and COO of Hypotenuse Labs, says we should all be paying attention because the blockchain technology being developed today will likely inform daily banking in the future. He likens what we are seeing today with blockchain technology to the innovation of the dot-com era 30 years ago, when the World Wide Web was an exciting novelty but unnecessary for everyday life.
Reyes points out that the internet didn’t die when the dot-com bubble burst. “We saw useless websites vanish, the ones that didn’t have any long-term value – but the infrastructure stayed. People used that base to build new things, and many of them are tools we now use every day.”
Read about what Reyes sees as the future of banking in the feature story in Waterloo Magazine.