According to The World Bank’s Global Findex report “1.7 billion adults remain unbanked, yet two-thirds of them own a mobile phone that could help them access financial services.”
The term “bank” as a metaphor for “financial services” is a persistent one. But, just as many emerging countries leapfrogged over landline telephones to mobiles for voice communication, so too may these “unbanked” people very easily glide past traditional institutions on their way toward modern, more personal, distributed financial service delivery models.
Bitcoin started a revolution that set the foundation of a new Internet for the transfer of value. A breakthrough direly needed in a world where half of the population has limited or no access to the basic financial services needed to prosper.
Decentralized by design, blockchain technology gives everyone a chance to participate in the new economy by providing the tools to create and verify personal identity, establish and execute agreements, and engage in commercial transactions at extremely low costs.
However, to achieve this at scale one needs:
- a software stack that is easy for programmers to adopt;
- a set of protocols that encompass multiple tokens and blockchain networks;
- support for business logic that meets or exceeds conventional financial transactions (e.g., payments, loans, etc.); and
- the kind of distributed security that only blockchain technology provides.
RSK built upon Bitcoin capabilities, enabling smart contract execution. And RIF OS takes the vision even further by making decentralized technologies accessible to traditional developers, organizations and innovators in order for them to create the applications needed for a prosperous and inclusive society.
Help us deliver on the promises we’ve heard at so many breathless conference keynotes and news articles.
Learn more about the RIF Open Source framework by contacting us at partners@RIFOS.co.