MAKSI-PPAk Public Lecture: Blockchain, The Future is Here
Rifdah Khalisha – Public Relations FEB UI
DEPOK – (24/9/2021) On Friday (24/9), the Master of Accounting – Professional Accountant Education (MAKSI-PPAk) FEB UI together with Deloitte held a public lecture themed “Blockchain: The Future is Here” online. The event featured speakers Andrew Koay (Director of Southeast Asia Blockchain Lab, Deloitte Southeast Asia) and William Tanuwijaya (Country Leader for Audit Transformation, Innovation, and Analytics, Deloitte Indonesia).
The presence of digital assets has changed all financial instruments, including digital banking. In short, all types of transactions are transforming for the better. Each party who is a customer of the financial services industry must also adapt.
In recent years, blockchain technology has grown progressively. William said, “Nowadays, many of you must have heard the term blockchain. We will often face this latest technology in the future.”
The banking industry across the country has successfully initiated collaborations with specialized (financial technology) and/or consulting firms to build proof of concept and explore potential use cases.
This implies the bank’s seriousness towards blockchain technology and its desire to understand the performance of blockchain in overcoming and solving some problems in the current state of the process.
Despite its complexity, blockchain is just another type of database for recording transactions. Then, the blockchain copies to all participating network computers in almost real time.
William and Andrew also explained the beginning of the adoption of blockchain technology through a hype cycle in digital banking transformation, which is divided into 5 phases. Initially, decentralized finance and non-fungible tokens were the trigger for innovation. Then, hope increased when the presence of blockchain asset tokenization, retail, and wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) arrived. In this phase, the public has started to know and investors have started to fund the technology.
At the same pace, the rapid development of expectations has been accompanied by a decline in expectations. Public interest in technology products dropped dramatically, precisely when blockchain arrived. However, some developers tried to improve their original product.
However, developers are starting to update or find the latest innovations so that technology products are more stable, able to meet the needs of the public during the presence of an open banking strategy, FS industry super apps, public cloud for banking, real-time payments, and social messaging payment apps. Finally, the public accepted and used it en masse.
“Over time, the term ‘Blockchain in Banking and Investment Services’ has changed from shorter to ‘Blockchain’ to reflect the fact that the technology now has relevance across a wide range of industries.” explained William.
Furthermore, Andrew said, “Blockchain enables secure shared ledger management, every transaction is verified and stored on the network without a central governing authority. Blockchains can come in different configurations, ranging from public blockchains, open source networks, to private ones, which require explicit permission to read or write.”
“Data on a blockchain is stored in fixed structures called blocks. An important part of a block is the header and content. The header includes metadata, such as a unique block reference number, block creation time, and a link back to the previous block. Meanwhile, content is usually a list of digital assets and a validated instruction statement, such as transactions, amounts, and addresses of the parties in the transaction,” he explained.
In a transaction, the two parties will exchange data that can represent money, contracts, deeds, medical records, customer details, or other assets in digital form. Each transaction must be cryptographically validated through a consensus mechanism run by the node, before being added permanently as a new ‘block’ at the end of the ‘chain’ so there is no need for a central authority to approve transactions. For this reason, blockchain is sometimes referred to as a trustless peer-to-peer mechanism.
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