What Enterprise Blockchain Can Learn From the Past

While the world of blockchain is only now embracing smart contracts for enterprise usage, programmable, machine-to-machine commerce has been around since the 1970s.

The world's paper-based systems for trade and logistics were already close to the breaking point.

Paul Brody is a Principal and Global Blockchain Leader at EY.The need for some kind of digital automation was urgent.

The SWIFT standards emerged in the world of banking at nearly the same time as EDI, and the result was something that looked very close to smart contracts, including digital payment execution to close the loop.

Let's learn from and seize the insights available from decades of digital commerce to build for the future.

Despite all the analog gaps, SWIFT and EDI are used to manage more than $19 trillion worth of cross-border trade, dwarfing any blockchain solution currently out there.

The world of blockchain has tended to focus a great deal on SWIFT and international payments.

The reality is that trade and finance go hand-in-hand, and to scale the world's blockchains, we need to start taking more pages from the enterprise commerce playbook.

In the world of blockchain, there is an immense opportunity to build a truly integrated system.

Steve Jobs loved repeating the saying, "Good artists copy, great artists steal." Let's learn from and seize the insights available from decades of digital commerce to build for the future.