Many in the fintech industry believe that blockchain is overhyped, but Jason Potts, who has made it his life’s work to study new technologies, actually believes it is under hyped and that it is a technology that changes the fundamental understanding of business and commercial interaction globally.

A month ago, he opened the Blockchain Innovation Hub, the first social science research institute on blockchain in the world. Starting with the study of how blockchain will affect markets, there are rapid plans for expansion to study the many different applications that are possible with blockchain protocols, and what that will mean for the nature of work and the nature of business.

Blockchain may be the technology that actually matches the natural nature of decentralized markets, ending the need for a central point of validation, and creating a much less inhibited flow of capital. Just as the internet changed the flow, nature, and control of information, the blockchain could do the same for money. But unlike the critical thinking and extra validation measures you need to put into information on the internet, the blockchain’s distributed ledger can act as a naturally incentivized, distributed, proof of validation.

It could change everything. And probably will.

Jason Potts is Professor of Economics in the School of Economics, Finance and Marketing at RMIT University, and Director of the Blockchain Innovation Hub, the first social science research institute on Blockchain in the world.

In 2017, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences of Australia. Jason is one of Australia’s top economists, specialising in economic growth, innovation and institutions, as well as the theory of economic evolution and complexity. His work has been applied to the economics of creative industries, intellectual property, and cities, and to the study of common pool resources. He received the Australian Research Council’s Future Fellowship, and was the youngest ever winner of the InternationalJoseph A. Schumpeter Prize.

He has written five books and published over 80 articles on these themes, and is a regular media commentator. He is currently the Vice-President of the International Joseph A. Schumpeter Society, an Adjunct Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs, editor of the Cambridge Elements series on Evolutionary Economics, and editor of the Journal of Institutional Economics.