The spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) approvals were a historic milestone for the space. However, it’s only a “stepping stone” toward integrating blockchain-based systems with traditional finance, according to Solana Foundation’s Sheraz Shere.
Shere, who is the head of payments at Solana Foundation, argued that the spot Bitcoin (BTC) ETFs are important in terms of opening up the digital asset space to a broader audience. This includes institutional investors and the general investing public. However, Shere believes there’s an opportunity to bring new use cases to traditional finance. Shere explained:
“The real opportunity is to bring more efficiency to these legacy financial systems and enable use cases that were not conceivable before, such as markets for any and all conceivable tokenized assets.”
While Shere believes this might take some time to play out, the executive believes that more regulatory clarity across the globe will eventually bring more traditional institutions to get involved with blockchain.
Apart from these, the executive added that the increased participation of enterprises in blockchain will also increase the number of users exposed to the technology. This will then attract more developers and founders to build on blockchain, perpetuating a growth cycle.
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On Jan. 24, the Solana Foundation announced a feature called “token extensions,” which aims to support developers, enterprises and financial institutions aiming to bring their businesses on-chain.
1/ Introducing token extensions on @Solana — unlocking powerful new capabilities for businesses, institutions, and developers building tokenized real-world and digital assets.https://t.co/H5OKBTdCdZ
— Solana Foundation (@SolanaFndn) January 24, 2024
According to Shere, the recently launched feature was built to address the concerns of enterprise-grade businesses. The executive said that it also natively included compliance solutions that would let developers navigate an ever-changing regulatory environment.
“Many of the reasons that would drive a regulated institution to use a private chain have now been mitigated by token extensions because compliance is built into the token standard,” Shere added.
The executive shared that the function allows asset issuers to prevent sanctioned wallets from touching their token and comply with regulators when mandated to freeze and seize assets. Shere also said that the feature could allow asset issuers to unmask the confidentiality of suspicious transactions.
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