About 600 people met in Frankfurt, Germany on Sep 1 for the Joint Fall Conference 2016 on “Blockchain: Technology, Legal and Regulation, and Applications in the Finance Realm”.

Before the conference and during the breaks, many attendees were actively debating to what extend we already face a hype in blockchain or distributed ledger technology.

The conference started with an introduction into blockchain as well as presentations of the current issues and trends.

The developments around The DAO drew the attention of the audience and has obviously affected the trust in blockchain technology quite negatively.

Florian Glaser from the E-Finance Lab in Frankfurt presented his research on the Raiden Network, an extension to Ethereum, which allows high speed off-chain asset transfers:

Raiden is a technology that leverages off-chain state networks to extend Ethereum with some nice properties for asset transfers:
 

• Scalable: it scales linearly with the number of participants
• Fast: Transfers are confirmed and final within the fraction of a second
• Confidential: Single transfers don’t show up in the global shared ledger
• Interoperable: Works with any token that follows Ethereum’s standardized token API
• Low Fees: Transaction fees can be 7 orders of magnitude lower than on the blockchain
• Micro-payments: Low transaction fees allow to efficiently transfer tiny values

The main topic of the conference, however, was legal and regulatory implications of blockchain technology.

In particular the presentation of Klaus Löber, Senior Advisor of the European Central Bank was highly interesting in that sense.

Mr. Löber also elaborated on the regulatory responses on blockchain technology, which are driven by different motivations e.g. consumer protection, prudential and market organisation rules, so the tools used by regulators vary a lot, from warnings to prohibition.

With respect to blockchain technology applications, various speakers presented their ideas for use-cases.

In his presentation “Blockchain and the Emergence of the Trust-Less Economy” Prof. Dr. Roman Beck from the IT University, Copenhagen, demonstrated several use-cases from Northern Europe, including car registration and transfer of ownership, which is currently explored by SKAT, the Danish tax authorities.