Has blockchain lost its momentum? Have the promises made no longer within reach? Will blockchain now go down in the annuls as the want-to-be that was merely a now seemingly defunct cryptocurrency play? Many experts are saying just that, that the reality of blockchain will go down as hype. McKinsey & Company posits “Across its many applications, blockchain arguably remains stuck at stage 1 in the lifecycle (with a few exceptions). The vast majority of proofs of concept (POCs) are in pioneering mode (or being wound up) and many projects have failed to get to Series C funding rounds. We are still awaiting that promised technologic revolution.”
To me one of the largest hurdles from the start was a lack of organization and unifying design principles for blockchain. Like many “open-source” software and technologies, the lack of these guiding principles create a double-edged sword: the beauty of unbridled creativity applied to addressing, overcoming, expanding and improving functionality, elegance, and effectiveness of a solution; the boundarylessness and lack of protocols that lead to chaos in the ecosystem, in-fighting amongst differing philosophies and approaches bringing chasms and diluted solution sets, and worst yet a loss of ability and belief in the technology ever making it to the initial visions of grandeur. I suppose we could always ask the Novell administrators or RedHat programmers their opinion! (Just for the record, I believe that regardless of market forces and technological piracy, Novell and its NDS Tree were the most elegant network structure and protocols ever copied and stolen)
Yet, the reports of blockchain’s death have been greatly exaggerated. (Mark Twain 1897). Interestingly today a VP of Technology for a $300M+ national firm asked me if I had any documentation or articles regarding a Tier-1 ERP and blockchain. I did. Maybe taking a 50,000-foot view of the benefits it was to have delivered would be worth a smell-test:”
- Decentralized
- Resilient
- Scalable
- Secure and Auditable
- Autonomous
- Transparent
- Quick
- Economic
- Increased Capacity
See “BeingCrypto”
Like Samuel Clemens’ overstated death, blockchain is alive and kicking. Our Dubaian, grandeur-building, wealthy, trendsetters, and ultimate one-ups-men are aspiring to become the first blockchain powered city by 2020. In this article Dr. Aisha Bint Butti Bin Bishr shares “Dubai has established itself, and in record time, as a global destination for innovators and entrepreneurs in the Blockchain industry. Guided by the vision of our leadership, the emirate has become synonymous with bravely embracing avant-garde technologies and utilizing them to create an advanced, connected and seamless urban experience for its residents and visitors.”. Further, all major ERP/MRP/Financial Software Developers are planning the integration of blockchain because “the value achieved through integrating blockchain with ERP systems comes not by creating and porting new information into the distributed ledger, but by drawing existing data from enterprise systems and being able to tightly control with whom it is shared” per a COMPUTERWORLD report.
Rather than loss of momentum or a death spiral, maybe blockchain is morphing, adjusting, and potentially finding its initial niche that is beneficial, valuable, and sustainable. Or maybe it is as big of a fad as Al Gore’s Internet. Who knows???