Accenture’s Melanie Cutlan and David Treat spoke to SiliconRepublic.com at the Hyperledger Global Forum the importance of blockchain interoperability and the ‘competition frontier’ of digital wallet infrastructure.
“The metaverse will impact everything we do, from consumers to enterprises, to how you manage your business, to the products that you buy”.
That’s according to Melanie Cutlan, Accenture MD and metaverse technology capabilities lead, who spoke at the Hyperledger Global Forum in Dublin yesterday (12 September).
Continuing today, the gathering features more than 100 speakers discussing key business issues for the Hyperledger community such as blockchain interoperability, climate change, digital identity and tokenomics.
Speaking at the event, Cutlan said that the momentum of the metaverse is creating a defining moment for leaders in the blockchain space.
A focus on the metaverse
Accenture has shown that the metaverse has already entered the world of work. Earlier this year, we spoke to Accenture Ireland’s talent brand lead, Kevin Ennis, on how the company is using the metaverse as part of its recruitment and onboarding strategies.
The consulting company revealed that it managed to onboard 150,000 employees during the Covid-19 pandemic using its metaverse technology.
Speaking to SiliconRepublic.com, Cutlan said that creating a sense of “togetherness” and “collaboration” was needed to onboard such a large volume of staff.
“It comes with an entire experience of unpacking, you’re not only getting a device, but you’re actually getting the experience to connect with other people,” Cutlan said.
Accenture has been researching the metaverse for around 15 years, with more than 600 patents related to the concept. The company has shared plans to continue making incursions into the metaverse, with its Indian arm playing a key role in these ambitions, Coingeek reports.
“We made a statement in 2013 that every business would be a digital business and we got some interesting reactions then,” Cutlan said. “The statement now is the metaverse is impacting all our ways of life, so there’s kind of no business left behind, across the board. And we’ve seen that consistent engagement across the board.”
This view was shared by David Treat, senior MD, global metaverse continuum business group and blockchain lead at Accenture. Treat is also the chair of the Hyperledger Foundation.
“We basically demonstrated that if you have an employee, the metaverse can help from an onboarding, training, culture building, community, collaboration perspective,” Treat said to SiliconRepublic.com. “So any company that has an employee will be able to benefit.”
Blockchain interoperability
Cutlan noted that new innovations are emerging within the internet, such as the “internet of ownership”. This is where blockchain and other technologies can create verifiable digital identities, allowing new digital products and currencies to be created.
Treat said the conversation around blockchain has moved on from the “Cambrian explosion” of different projects in the past, to a discussion around the “combinations and the relationships between projects”.
Treat previously told SiliconRepublic.com that blockchain is like a team sport. Yesterday, he spoke of the importance of the Hyperledger Global Forum for discussions around blockchain interoperability.
“This is the only place to talk through the whole notion of the hybrid models that are going to take advantage of different ledgers for different purposes with different capabilities,” Treat said.
Treat said he has spoken to clients that have been “paralysed from moving forward” on projects, because they were concerned about picking the wrong blockchain tech. He noted that a focus on interoperability between blockchain technologies helps to remove the concern of picking the “Betamax” option.
“If you enable an environment to allow more than one ledger to succeed and then to work through interoperability, then we can focus on advancing the more valuable parts of the functionality, efficiency, capabilities and the like,” Treat said.
Digital wallets: A competition frontier
One developing area that both Treat and Cutlan are interested in is the idea of digital wallets that allow users to carry their identity, money and objects from place to place.
“The winning digital business in the next period is the one who creates the most trusted access to that wallet,” Treat said. “So if you’re part of designing the standards and the infrastructure for it, I think that’s the competition frontier for a lot of companies.”
Treat said there are three industries that are best positioned to go after this “frontier”, which are financial services, the telecoms industry and finally, providers of hardware and cloud providers.
“So how it plays out between those three industries, I think it’s going to be fascinating,” Treat said.
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