Podcast: Trust in Blockchain

Written by Jen McKeeman

04 October 2021

‘Trust is about knowing the person you deal with, and the relationship you have, has your best interests in mind.’

 

Olga Mack is CEO of Parley Pro, a Blockchain Strategist and author of ‘Blockchain Value: Transforming Business Models, Societies and Communities’.

Having witnessed the collapse of the banking system in the former Soviet Union as a child and the traumatic impact it had on individuals and society, Olga has first-hand experience of what happens when the trust we place in institutions doesn’t work.

Olga’s family emigrated to the US at a young age - chosen for being perceived as a country with an ‘amazing banking system’! Always having an interest in searching for something different, Olga joined a blockchain company in 2018. Although no longer working there, she is still very active in the blockchain community.

In this podcast, Olga explores how you can manage the concept of trust at scale moving on from trust on a one-to-one level. She acknowledges the need for something more systematic, more technological, such as blockchain, to facilitate trust on a scalable level.

If you would like to hear more from Olga on the potential blockchain offers, why not have a listen to the full interview:

Apple Podcasts

Spotify

Key insights

  • Importance of being able to create scalable trust
  • Compelling use cases of trust
  • Potential applications of blockchain

The following is a short excerpt from Trust in Blockchain featuring Olga’s perspective on trust.

Olga Mack: ‘From building trust one-on-one, to making our institutions more trustworthy because they’re not going anywhere anytime soon. And then how can we scale that so we can facilitate trust across institutions, across geographies, across different political systems, across the world. And It's a journey.. And I think building trust, there’s something very human about it. It’s a skill and it’s absolutely worth investing in and I also think this prospective look into what we can do is a very healthy way to look at it.

I think trust is a process that needs to be evaluated at a very dynamic, socio-economic political context and increasing technical capabilities so that it keeps up with time.; so we deliver the trust that is expected today. People often refer to a ‘trust crisis’ - I think there are many reasons for that crisis. Part of it is because we have not been updating our practices and the world is becoming much more developed in transparent ways. Folks share stuff on social media that has been private historically. That means that our definition of trust and what it means to build it has changed. It’s not that our institutions got worse; they might have but also our baseline expectations have changed.’