The word “Blockchain” gets thrown around a lot these days. Used so often—and in so many different contexts—it’s hard to exactly define what it actually means. In short, it’s a buzzword. As Tim Swanson of the R3 Consortium attests, the word doesn’t mean a whole lot beyond “something magical”: the magical super-technology that fits into every excited sentence you can come up with about fintech.

For the purposes of the interview, Swanson defines the word “Blockchain” as a kind of distributed ledger: a data structure that’s “cryptographically secured,” “tamper resistant,” and “stored in the cloud.” Importantly, this is to say that Blockchains are only one form of distributed ledger.

Technically, what R3 is building isn’t a Blockchain per se; it’s a different kind of distributed ledger R3’s raised 100 million dollars for. It’s a lot of money. That’s what it takes to deploy a distributed ledger at scale, “for regulated financial institutions and capital markets specifically.”

Listen in to learn more about R3, and hear more of Tim Swanson’s insights on fintech. Be sure to subscribe, review, and if you can, donate some BitCoin to the cause.

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