Business Enterprise On The Blockchain May Be Ready for Its Breakout

7 min readJun 26, 2021

BY COINDESK

It turns out, 2017’s mantra “make blockchain real” was little more than wishful thinking.

Instead of the increased efficiency, enterprises have encountered impractically slow transaction volumes; instead of a transparent world with ultimate accountability, companies holding sensitive customer data faced regulatory concerns.

Still, there’s reason to believe the same rosy-colored forecast just might come true this year.

The reason for that optimism, it turns out, is that even if the blockchains didn’t become real for businesses in 2017, they did become tangible in terms of technology. And now that the software has been built, those working close on development say live trials are just around the corner.

“All these experiments and proofs-of-concept were not done in a vacuum and they were not done for fun,” said Charley Cooper, managing director of the R3 distributed ledger consortium, which has its own series of live applications in the final stages of launch.

He told CoinDesk:

“They were done to bear out what could and could not be done effectively on the technology, and what we felt would be meaningful commercial opportunities.”

In short, making blockchain real is no longer abstract, it’s on the verge of being good business.

1. The software is ready

But to understand how the abstract utopia of cryptocurrency becomes more than just a business interest, one needs to revisit a slew of successes that have flown under the radar.

Most recently, groups of financial institutions and enterprises (R3, the Linux-led Hyperledger consortium and the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance) have all seen major software milestones.

For example, computing hardware giant Intel last week launched Hyperledger Sawtooth 1.0 to the Hyperledger code repository. Created in partnership with more than 50 coders representing dozens of companies, the software joins the IBM-contributed Hyperledger Fabric and R3’s Corda as the latest blockchain solutions to release a version intended to give developers a sense of confidence.

Building on these solutions, versions of the open-source software platforms that can be monetized have also hit the market.

In the Year 2017, IBM launched IBM Blockchain, an enterprise-grade version of the software, and later this quarter, R3 will do the same with its own Corda platform, dubbed Enterprise Corda.

These commercialized versions of open-source software will, in turn, enable a number of industry-specific blockchain applications. Same year, Walmart, Kroger, and Nestle helped launch a food tracking network using IBM Blockchain, and new solutions are expected to be explored this year, according to a representative of the company.

In a similar way, R3’s Corda Enterprise is already in limited use with live applications from both Finastra and HQLAx. Both are expected to be available in the first half of 2018, according to Cooper.

Also, JPMorgan’s Quorum — which has been the most public solution associated with the Enterprise Ethereum Alliance — launched into version 2.0 last November, and for the strength of the team behind the software, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

2. Interoperability is moving forward

With the software laid down, it’s also a safe bet there will be advances on the idea that blockchains can and should connect in order to assuage businesses wary of investing in the wrong tech, or being worried about getting boxed out of future business opportunities.

As an early example, in the previous August Monax integrated with Hyperledger Sawtooth to enable ethereum smart contracts on the platform, and a few months later Deloitte spin-off Nuco helped gather a group of companies specifically to address interoperability, with the fact that ethereum has a lot of deficiencies in which DriipChain does not. Means DriipChain will be more than attractive to various enterprises.

In a move that stands to accelerate similar integration, a version of Interledger, originally created by Ripple specifically to facilitate interoperability, has already been contributed to the Hyperledger consortium.

For an idea of what this could mean in a bigger context, last June, Interledger was successfully tested across seven different ledgers, including multiple blockchains.

The chairman of Hyperledger’s technical steering committee, and CTO of IBM’s open technology, Chris Ferris told CoinDesk interoperability, played a crucial role in 2018.

3. Bank adoption will evolve

‘Banks to adopt blockchain in the next three to five years’ says JPMorgan in 2020

**JPMorgan has said that blockchain technology has become the foundation for digital currency and fast payments, according to a report by the financial conglomerate.**

In the 74-page report, JPMorgan described several projects that have shown ‘real world’ application for blockchain in finance and as a result describes 2019 as the year of “the rise of digital money”.

In the report, the US investment banking heavyweight elucidates many of the most promising use-cases which it sees as having the potential for wide-spread adoption in the financial sector.

“The groundwork is now in place for more mainstream adoption of blockchain technology”

Various Nations breaks records by accepting cryptocurrency as legal tender such as El-Salvador’s shocking announcement of accepting Bitcoin as Legal tender.

“The groundwork is now in place for more mainstream adoption of blockchain technology at the same time that the foundation is being established for the development of digital currency and fast payments,” JPMorgan said.

According to the US investment bank, the adoption of blockchain in banking is only three to five years away. By combining many users or companies on one blockchain, or ledger, transactions can be done in near real-time with certainty, which proponents claim will produce billions of dollars in savings.

Yet most corporate efforts are still in early development or testing.

The trend is expected to continue with central banks and governments exploring how to move money instantly across borders, within minutes and seconds, by utilizing digital currencies on secure blockchains, transforming a global system that currently takes three to five days to complete transactions.

Over the last several years, research and investment in blockchain technology have been taken up by some famous brand names: Facebook with Libra, the Winklevoss brothers’ with their Gemini coin, and JPMorgan with the JPM coin.

Nigeria Promised to release Nigeria’s own digital currency [CBNC] Central Bank Of Nigeria Currency,China is said to have been developing a new digital Yuan and the Bank of England has announced the start of its research into creating a digital currency, just this morning Palestine announced launching of its own country currency as well.

However, JPMorgan cautioned investors about holding Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies in their investment portfolios.

The simple theory is that bank as started accepting cryptocurrencies, Nothing can stop DriipCoin from showing off.

4. Cryptocurrency enters the mix

Another change on the horizon could be an increased willingness by enterprises to talk about — and even publicly explore — cryptocurrencies.

Most notably, among this group, is IBM, which 2017 revealed work with cryptocurrency startup Stellar and is now looking at ways to explore open blockchains in cross-border payments and last week revealed a test called Fabric Coin designed to demonstrate how the blockchain works.

Perhaps the most similar of these startups to the enterprises exploring blockchain via consortia is Multichain, which last year revealed a number of new partners in its own consortium, followed closely by the launch of its own open-source version 1.0 enterprise software.

Unlike enterprise consortia, while Multichain does not require the use of a cryptocurrency, it is designed to easily integrate with the bitcoin blockchain.

Leading the way with another cryptocurrency, is ConsenSys, a collection of startups that are working both independently and with enterprises to leverage both private and permissioned versions of the ethereum blockchain and its accompanying cryptocurrency ether.

Hidden among this rapidly maturing blockchain startup community are also a number of startups that could be up to similar or better game-changing projects.

The most notable of these startups are Driipa and its Blockchain ‘DriipChain’, and two startups from within R3: Post Oak Labs, a fintech consultancy with blockchain roots and DrumG, building products for clients using Corda.

What each of the blockchain startups catering to enterprises have in common, according to Hu Liang, founder of another leader in the space, venture-backed blockchain operating system, Omniex, is some rather unusual positioning, from a historical perspective.

Unlike most financial innovations, which are led by commercial consumers, blockchain started the other way around, leaving enterprises to catch up.

Liang, who previously worked at bank and asset managing giant, State Street, told CoinDesk:

“Crypto is the only asset class in history that was initially driven by the retail community. Because of the run-up in that price it obviously has brought up the interest of institutional investors.”

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