BCBusiness

May 2018 The New Money

With a mission to inform, empower, celebrate and advocate for British Columbia's current and aspiring business leaders, BCBusiness go behind the headlines and bring readers face to face with the key issues and people driving business in B.C.

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32 BCBusiness MAy 2018 demand," he says. "But the experience in the space is kind of lacking. "People have to do their due diligence," Hobbs continues. "They've got to look at these companies that are going public and look at them really hard. Have they ever built a block- chain product before?" He compares the current situation to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s: "A ton of companies came in really quickly, there was a lot of hype—and there's not a lot of those companies around today. My hope is we can build something better. I mean, that's our goal." Chasing CrYpto's Criminal element Building a better, safer blockchain is also the goal of Vancouver lawyer Christine Duhaime. Duhaime advises startups in the ‰ntech and blockchain world. In 2014 she founded the Digital Finance Institute, an independent research group that aims to address issues "at the nexus between ‰nancial innovation, digital ‰nance policy and regulation." "I think there is no question that, like any ‰nancial instrument, there are examples of bit- coin being used for ‰nancial crime," Duhaime acknowledges. "A big one that bothers me a lot is that bitcoin is used frequently for fen- tanyl; the dealers get fentanyl through China, and they pay for it with bitcoin. So that's an example, really dear to all of our hearts here in Vancouver, where bitcoin wallets are being used by fentanyl, and it's killing people." Duhaime notes that digital currency exchanges aren't regulated by Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis of Canada (FinTRAC)—the federal agency that gathers and analyzes intelligence on suspicious ‰nancial transactions—leaving it up to the individual exchange to do its own due diligence. That's where she steps in, in an advisory role, to help build more-transparent bitcoin wallets, with systems in place to monitor suspect behaviour. "The exchange needs to have its own meth- ods of procedures because it doesn't want a BUILdIng BLocks A pioneer in the Vancouver crypto- currency space, Lisa Cheng runs an incu- bator for blockchain companies

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